Trail's End 



PS 

3541 
NO? 



Poems of New Mexico 



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CIP 






By John Curtis Underwood 



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Class i___ 

Book 

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COEnSllillT DEPOSIT 



By John Curtis Underwood 

War Flames. 

Processionals. 

The Iron Muse. 

A mericans. 

Literature and Insurgency. 



TraiVs End 

By 

John Curtis Underwood 




Santa Fe, N. M. 
1921 



New Mexican Publishing Corporation 



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Cotrrigkl by 

John Curlls Vndtnmod 

1921 



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'5/92/ 



(O)Cl.A6i?506 






To 
Two Women 



CONTENTS 

Foreword _. _ „_ __ 7 

Burros g 

Flivvers _ _ 10 

The Plaza 12 

The Old Palace > 14 

The Frijoles Room 16 

The Alcove .- _ ..._ 18 

Palace Undertaking Parlors _ JZ9 

The Corner Dmg Store _.._... 21 

Rosario's 22 

San Miguel , 24 

The Oldest Church - -... _ 25 

The Hat Shop 26 

The Tea Room 27 

The Bank . ig 

The Garage 29 

The Swimming Pool 34> 

The Studio _.- _._.31 

Casa Pintada _ 32 

The Old Bells 33 

The Blind Wood Chopper 34 

Arturo _ , _ _ 35 

The Yellow Kiva - _... . 36 

The Paris _ _ 37 

Hotel de Olid _ _ — - _ 39 

The Old Adobe 40 

Penitentes — ,_ -._ _ .-..41 

Santa Fe Forenoon — 42 

The Tower _ 43 

Still Life - - 44 

Star Spray ._ .45 

Winter Midnight _ — - 46 

Winter Morning , 47 

Winter Noon .48 

The Ride Home _ 50 

Rito Del Frijoles - - 51 

Com Dance, San Domingo ~ — -. - 53 

The Heritage - - - - -55 

The Trail Mender _. — .57 

Goats - _.... — - 58 

Processional _ -60 

The Dimple .— — - -61 

The Spring ..._ _ — - , -62 

Lost Lake - - - 63' 

Tesuque Church — - - - - 64 

Ten Candles — - - 65 

The Cabin - — ~ --66 

The Santa Fe Trail - -- 67 

The Old Dim Trail _ _ 69 

The Revenant — .- - -70 

Treasure Seekers ••— — 72 

Puppets and People _ 73 

Pussy Cats and Cherubim. — -.■- 74 

Sunset — New Mexico .._ - - 76 

High School Tennis Court _ - — 78 

Envoy ....- — '9 



FOREWORD 



My fathers tracked across the plains. 
Forebears in heart, mayhap in blood. 
To find this region that retnaios 
Raised from the sea's salt flood. 

They learned its highlands and its trails. 
Its snow peaks and arroyos brown, 
Its forests green, its misty veils 
Rolling gray mountains down. 

They knew blue skies of Paradise, 
Its dry, clear air whose breath is life, 
Its high rock bastioned ruins that rise 
Hewed by a giant's knife; 

Its gardens and its orchard trees. 
Along the trenched acequia's flow, 
Unfailing as its sun that sees 
All things that smile and grow; 

Where long, low, brown adobe walls 
Leaning along the foot hills, climb; 
Home of a brown skinned race that calls 
With the slow smile of time. 

This old. star-trailed Franciscan town 
Where life is always afternoon. 
Wrapped in its ragged robe of brown. 
My fathers found one June. 



s 

BURROS 

We met four burros in the streets of Santa Fe one steel blue moi-ning, 
When snow on the mountains crept lower down trails they were 

treading. 
Two were gray, and two were brown to match the merchandise they 

marched with, 
Naked cedar split and frost rimed piled on gnarled brown pinyon 

wood, 
Bound round furry backs and flanks in huge wooden horseshoes. 

And the gray and brown small brothers of St. Francis plodded soberly, 
Turning corners of the long and crooked trail their fathers tracked 

from Burgos and Assisi, 
Trampling planks of tossing ships and foam swept beaches brown as 

Mexico, 
Treading where the padres tramped, on trails as brown as tattered 

robes that fluttered round them. 

They went stacked with stuff for fire that flamed far northward in 
strong sunlight. 

The padres' skin burned brown through torrid summers; their burros' 
hair grew long and thicker through bleak winters. 

And the flame that fired its human torches in Toledo, and leapt across 
the sea, harrassed them still and swept them with it. 

The brown padres sweated in the desert, and the burros walked be- 
side them bearing food and wine and water. 

The gray padres shivered on white mesas where their burros carried 
firewood, charcoal, and live coals in battered braziers. 

The burros carried crosses like their threadbare mastei-s of slow 
martyrdoms. 

Uprights rough and cross bars crude, men rudely joined and set to- 
gether and raised. 

By bright springs and turbid rivers, on brown rocks and mountains 
meeting sunrise. 

They bore rude wooden symbols of a life that parched in deserts 
burned and thirsted with a yearning infinite; 

Warmed the dead to life, and dying lifted high a torch of red tradition 
that each padre's burning body raised from dying once more. 

And the burros beside the padres such as bore a Babe in Egypt, 
brought the crosses home to Santa Fe; 

Saw their shadows when they grew from earth; and lost them when 
men raised them higher; 

Heard the bells beside them chiming through three centuries of rhym- 
ing gray traditions. 

And they bore the little children of those dying years that laughing 
beat them with brown billets saved from crimson fires. 

Still they bear their timber horseshoes of good luck to all who conquer 

cold and hunger, with slight tools of light; 
Bearing split wood for sacrifice to faith that forms its crosses where 

two faggots set together light their fire on earth's bare altar. 
They bear brown laughing children where the brown cathedral's bells 

are chiming, rhyming still old rituals; 
Stepping soberly and slowly, small brown brothers of St. Francis, 

small gray guardians 
Of the splintered keys of sight, and love like his, like light, for 

sun and mountain, star and shadow; 
Burden bearers, high and holiest, like the lowliest and the least, bird 

or beast. Santa F6 11 7 18 



10 



FLIVVERS 

They come and stand in the Plaza and drink deep there. 

While their riders drink deep at our bubble fountains and soda 

fountains ; 
Little tin tramps of the world with bulging side pockets and canteens, 
And bedding rolled and shouldered on roofs as deep in dust. 
As the bleached straw suit cases strapped behind and never opened 
From Lowell, Moline and Mobile to Santa Monica and San Diego. 

Their women wear clothes like their men as often as not, 
Sweaters, riding breeches, miners' boots and faded khaki overalls. 
Hiding all from head to foot but sun-browned faces and svm-tanned 

fingers, 
Girls that have soaked in the sun and bathed in it in brown and 

hidden arroyos. 
Some of them sit in the Plaza with little hand mirrors and vanity 

cases and powder their faces. 
Some i)encil letters and diaries, and some take time to stare 
At gray burros and brown adobes whUe their mothers ate marketing. 
Big brown women and little wiry ones with bulging, faded, flowered 

knitting bags. 

The flivvers stand fast or stUk to garages to be blacksmithed. 

Men with the trail's slow traces in browning faces. 

Of freedom from shop and farm and office desk and folio. 

Curb them, swing them away, feed them, groom them and bring 

them back 
Where the women and children are waiting. 

Children whose eyes grow bright from miracles overnight. 

Crowding an epic into three months or four, 

Since they beat through spring rain and sleet and mud that was 

bottomless, 
On an endless old Santa F6 trail, and the rest like the streams of a 

water shed; 
Till the high plains passed one night, and the sun pulled out of the 

sky line 
A far, faint saw-toothed coast line of mountains that marched together. 
Marched and mounted in monstrous ranks till they looked like a wall 

at the end of the world. 



11 



There where the West begins they filed through the passes. 
And the ■women walked with the children up shortcuts to zigzags. 
To the wheel tracks on the summits; and they stared and wondered 

and went on. 
Slowly breathing the beauty of God's vast world at last revealed 

to them. 
They moved on with it day by day, and grew used to it, 
Rolling closer to the westering sun, and camping nearer the stars 

night after night. 
They met bleak mesas and buttes, they forded wide rivers of sand 

that sucked at the wheels. 
They turned and twisted, rose and dipped, slewed and slipped past 

range after range in a maze of mountain wonderlands. 
Where a man might lose himself utterly, and a woman go mad at 

the thought of it. 

Slowly they lost the old selves of little tame tastes and futile hastes. 
As they dared the deserts and the snows through blue days like beads 

on the trail's brown rosary. 
Till a thousand trails that converge from Old Mexico to Montana 

and Canada, 
Met on tht last brown slopes where bronchos at sun-up shy at girls in 

blankets like logs by the road. 
They wanted water, oil and gas, ice cream and ice drinks and tense 

minutes at the movies again. 
And some of them wandered into the past in our Palace and knew 

new mysteries. 

They halt in our street? and refit, and some of us envy them. 
Who live on the roof of the world, and still hug chain gangs of habit. 
As they stutter away to the sunset with their faded and fluttering 

pennants. 
And their dusty moving tents of Romance on various adventures. 
And their eyes hold wider horizons, and their lips are wiser and 

warmer, 
With their little human hopes and plans, and their hearts on the 

sun's high pilgrimage. 

Santa Fe 2 22 19 



12 



THE PLAZA 

Motors weave their mazes around it. 
Motors stand empty and waiting for shopping women, 
Where dusty, high tilted, spliced and weather stained. 
Swaying and creaking, the lumbering ox wagons 
Rolled to the end of the Trail. 

Cowboys' bronchos clatter over red brick pavements, 

Girls in sweaters, trim puttees, trig riding breeches. 

Tenderfoot girls in high-heeled shoes, khaki leggins and peek-a-boo 

waists, 
Red capped school girls two together, are riding bare back and 

circling. 
Where the gaunt chargers of the dust gray Conquistadores 
Limped and flinched from bits and spurs that propped them from 

falling. 

Boys on bicycles glide and loop, 

Where the long pack trains of mules and pack horses plodded and 

slithered. 
Fledgling priests from St. Michael's with purple pennants and ribbons, 
Bound for a ball game go eating ice cream cones, 
Where the learned Padres tramped the long trail from Old Mexico. 
And the Padres' burros still stand here sleekly obsequient. 

Indians sunburned red for a thousand years from Tesuque and San 

Ildefonso, 
With their red head bands and blankets of life glowing red in them, 
Flame past benches where bank clerks, cigar drummers, tourists, T-B's, 
Cough and chatter like apes, and chew black tobacco and big black 

war head lines, 
Passing proudly and imperially erect and self sufficient. 
As their free fore-runners were in the days when this place was the 

fore-court of a Pueblo capital. 

The ghosts of those proud Pueblo days and the stark stone age be- 
fore it. 

Ghosts of the old dear idle days when men gossiped here of Marat 
and Napoleon, 

Ghosts of trappers of Taos and Jesuits of Rome whose eyes struck 
sparks like swords, 



13 



Ghosts of Forty-Niners who tarried to refit on their gold rush west- 
ward, 

Ghosts of Sibley's Confederates who gambled as wildly here for a 
continent, 

Ghosts of the gladdest girls who ever smiled at mountain sunrise or 
mandolin music; 

Ghosts of the saddest widows and prostitutes who ever implored Oui 

Lady of Pity, 
Ghosts of yesterday, before the railroad came, ghosts of desperados 

and their slayers, of Billy the Kid, and Pat Garrett, 
Ghosts of the day before yesterday, when the first trails that tied 

together here were faint as a dream's forgetfulness. 
Ghosts of Onate and Benevides, of Casteiiada, of Coronado and De 

Vargas, 

Ghosts of Doniphan and Armijo, of Fremont and Kit Carson and Lew 

Wallace, 
Ghosts of fighters and writers and builders of low adobes and red 

brick abortions, 
Ghosts of the past and today and tomorrow, still fuse in this focus 

of living. 

They live in the laughter of children that their fathers' fathers begot. 

They live in the smiles of women whose bodies and souls they wor- 
shiped and lusted for. 

They live in the looks of men that they loved and killed, and traded 
with and betrayed. 

They live in the houses they builded, the trees they planted, the turf 
they sodded, the pavements they laid here. 

In this gray meeting place of the winds of God and the wills of men 
for the feet of those that should follow them; 

Here where the trails meet and cross, as the paths in the Plaza meet 
and croS'5, 

In this fore-court of adventure by old camp fires of longing and for- 
getfulness; 

Where the ghosts gather with the living in the sunlight and moonlight. 

And the motors whirl like smoke, and the mountains stand sentry 
eternally. 

Santa F6 11 15 18 



14 



THE OLD PALACE 

It lies, a long, low procession of life epitomized, rough cast in adobe, 
Like a slow and plodding line of old Spanish Conquistadores, 
Straggling through dust and heat, dead beat footmen following sweat- 
ing horsemen. 
Trailing rusty lances idly, and leaving dusty furrows in the sand 

behind them. 
On the endless trail from Old Mexico to New Mexico. 

They crept past brown and dry arroyos and bare and wind-swept 

ridges. 
Gray, dust gray, with the steel in them dulled and dented 
By the bowlders the Indians hurled at them from the tops of the tall 

terraced houses. 
They crawled past beetling crags, and black mesas, and sombre 

shadows of mountains that menaced them. 
They stabbed the cactus with their spears and drank its life-blood to 

sustain them, and pressed on past passes eternally unattainable; 
Till they slaked their horses' dusty throats at last in the smooth gray 

ripples of the Rio Grande del Norte. 

They sweated past the sand hills on old trading trails of the Queres 

and Tehuas, 
They topped the last lean ridge, and watched a little river flowing 

westward through a valley time had left tor them. 
Those that were left from the trail and the trial the desert had made 

of them. 
And they found peach orchards, and maize fields, and a Pueblo, and 

a place for them; 
For a hand of life had led them to build here a city and a home 

for them. 

They were the first forefingers of hands that wandered groping, 
The first blunt forefingers of a tide that swept westward through the 

ocean from bleak acres by Corunna and Santandar, 
Down from the orange and pomgranate groves to the wilder gold of 

the sunset. 
Seeking room to spread and grow and glut its hunger insatiate for 

gold and great adventuring, 
Eddying north from narrower limits near the Gulf, to the uplands 

of a widening continent. 
And the desert took toll of them, but they pressed on and multiplied 

until they taxed the desert. 



15 



They tithed it and ditched it and built homes for the spirit of the 

race that led them, 
Such as the Moors made and the Goths made when they met and 

mated in Spain. 
And this old palace was the type and the chief of them. 
They made homes for flocks and herds such as followed with the 

Indians and women when Coronado marched from Mexico, 
As they made homes for earlier folk migrations of all herdsmen 

through the centuries, 
First made a corral, then a isquare and a frontage of tenting for the 

face of it. 

And the corral and the tenting grew to a courtyard and a patio with 
shaded arcades, 

Such as the Moors made in Cordoba with rows of tent poles for their 
first slim pillars. 

The Spanish captains and governors came to herd nnd pasture their 
people here, 

And they made a greater sheep-fold and a Great House for the herd- 
ing, and the people called it El Palacio — . 

It stands as gray as the sheep with tree trunk pillars brown as 

stripped posts of corrals. 
Made of the same sun-dried mud that the older herders and builders 

wrought with, 
Long and broadly based, primitive and significant as a pueblo or a 

pyramid. 
Where time made it a gray and lasting monument of a race that 

passed and yet lives here. 
It stands a tomb of the past, and a treasure house of gray traditions 

and hidden histories. 

It stands like an old gray college or cloister in Toledo or Salamanca.. 

More than tomb or college or cloister it embodies the past and inter- 
prets it. 

With the leaves of its libraries, the ticking of its typewriters, the 
calling of its telephones talking to today and tomorrow. 

And the brown, ranked pillars of its long arcade are the pillars of 
proud triumphal arches. 

The great ghosts of the past stride through them, and then stand 
back again and mingle 

With the natives and the tourists, and the painters and poets and 
lovers in the Plaza in the moonlight who linger and love it. 

Santa F6 Ifl 5 18 



16 



THE FRUOLES ROOM 

They made an echo of antiquity 

Of the room where Lew Wallace wrote Ben Hur in the early Eighties, 

With his leather covered Morris chair and leather covered lap board 

on its arms by one window. 
And the shadows work on it, and shadows of a time as olJ as Jerusalem 
Move in the place or rest like the words of a finished manuscript. 

They fill the low show cases in the corners. 

And two huge wall cases hewed from a three-foot adobe partition. 

They flow through low doors in walls as thick at each end of the room. 

In a low and narrow vista of door on door receding 

Through the whole past of the Palace to shadowy doors before them. 

They lie on white wooden shelves and wide surfaces, 
ShadoW'3 of the past solidified in hand-worked bone and stone. 
Shadows in hanging trays of glass like X-ray prints of the bones of the 

past, 
Skeleton fragments of the days when the caves cf Tyuonyi were hand 

carved and crowded. 
Bone awls for ghostly garments, bone flutes tor ghostly music, 
Stone arrow heads, spear heads and cherts for shadowy huntings 

and killings. 

There are deep shadows on rank on rank of stone axe heads and 

hammers. 
Line on line of the story of the felling of trees and the wedging of 

vigas for balconies. 
Where shadowy women gossip and scold and walk on the face of 

the cliff. 
And children whose bodies have crumpled are playing on ladders 

whose substance is dust. 
There are hard shadows of stone hand mills where girls ground blue 

com. 
And the crude stone quern still holds dull shadows of the rhythm of 

the rubbing that caressed it, 
Where they bent brown breasts to it, that swelled as they sang to it, 

There are round shadows of smooth black stones one could hide in 
her palm as she polished pottery. 



17 



There are shadows in the big flat bowls of gray and white and brown 

and ruS'Set, 
Where the life of a tribe that was, has slowly burned through the clay. 
There are bowls whose circle is broken like the circle of feasters 

that dipped from them. 
There are patterned shards like fragments of lives men pattern out 

piece by piece. 

There are shadowy shafts of arrows and hand-carved stones for their 

smoothing. 
Shadows of the craft of old men who fashioned and fitted and [lew 

with them. 
There are throwing sticks and praying sticks and prayer plume 

holders of clay. 
There are brown and white turkey feathers intact, and strange 

ornaments 
For the great high cave of the kiva deep-niched in the cliff, 
Like a lost high altar of living in a ghostly cathedral whose transepts 

are builded in air. 

There are shadows of shadowy symbols of dead rituals, 

Shadows of the dancers' plumes that felt brown feet that felt high 

ladders. 
And the hard, brown rocks of the valley when life was vivid and 

good to them; 
Till the last lone fire at the foot of the cliff died out on a dead 

black winter's night. 
And the last lost wailing echo of living sang to it. 
And to lite that writes in shadowy symbols, broken pictures, dying 

men and gospels misspelled. 
In Tyuonyi even as Jerusalem. 

Santa Fe 12 30 18 



18 



THE ALCOVE 

The light streams down from above through a gray wire glass sky light, 
Like cloudy light that falls in a shadowy sea cave, 
Where pearls and corals glow, and abalones slowly open living opals. 
Near flame-tipped sea shells, obscured by sea-green sea weed and 

great red sea fans. 
Under the feathery shimmering shifting of frondage, water, color and 

light. 
The hard, brown rock stands out like tie ribs of being. 

The ocean shimmers through the hues of translucent canvases; 

In a stirle&3 tide of air that floods the Grand Canyon's terraced 

abysses, 
Through frail and rifted veils of mist that drift apart and reveal; 
Opals and pearls and dead red spoils of fossil centuries. 
Far-flung treasure of Titans washed by the waves 
Round points and bays and hazy purple coasts of sunset and sunrise. 

It beats round the high piled massive of the silent mountains of Taos, 
Like a tall sea island rising between the tide and the sky. 
Out of a great gray plain toward the cloud drift of spent whirlwinds, 
Eddying, swirling slowly till the hills lift up their hands. 
And strain down snow and rain that the spring may blossom again. 
And the rocks that wrestle with heaven for a parapet for far plains. 
Stand in strong blues and sage grays as a strong sea island stands- 
through ages. 

The ocean rises and flowers again in April through new fruit trees. 
Ghosts of dead seas and seasons that spread and lapped through the 

valleys rise with the swelling of sap. 
Apple trees blossom in spray, and peach trees rai.se pink swirls of fire. 
Below them snow still lingers in blue shadows as polar as shades of 

icebergs in sea lanes. 
In the lee of the low gray adobes with red peppers still hanging by 

the doors. 

The ocean moulded the walls of these churches, 

Of Ranches de Taos that stands like a rock sea-flung by Spain towards 

the north and the mountains. 
Weathered and rounded, storm beaten by years. 
Of the shadow netted Sanctuarlo by Chimayo, 



19 



Soaking in light in the hills like a sponge that clings to the cleft of 

a reef; 
And of the brown cathedral corner tower in Santa Fe, 
Like a crumbling ishore rock bastion of a faith today forgotten more 

and more. 

The ocean moulded the growth of flat acres of grease weed. 
Like a low sea forest raised from the ooze to the sunlight. 
Where salt gray waves once rippled and slowly drained away. 
The ocean shaped the trees that veil and reveal wide mountain Tistas, 
Poplars pointed like rocks and cottonwoods spreading like sea weed. 
With fingers of tides in the veins of each leaf, and the spreading of 
eddies in circles concentric of years hid in gray trunks. 

The ocean moulded the hand and the mind of the man who made 
these pictures, 

Out of its salt spring of being that knows not dying or dry rot. 
That ripples and wells through the ages of sunlight and starlight and 

moonlight. 
It moulded and made and sent him to silently preach to the people. 
In this small side chapel of service unceasing in today's gray cathedral, 
Where men light pictures to God instead of candles and lamps, 
Silently preaching the rhythm and the flow and the glow of the tides 

of all living 
Till the hand of the painter is dust, and his mind is a mist in the 

midnight, 
And the gleam of the strength in his soul like a pearl in a sea cave 
In a gray little alcove of time is a treasure of light that remains. 

Santa Fe 11 24 18 



20 



PALACE UNDERTAKING PARLORS 

Late at night, next to the post office, 

A huge square window with one craclc in it gapes darkly, 

Like the black mouth ot a cave of death where silence whispers 

All lost horrors of the past, and today's last hopelessness. 

Two green shaded lamps like the eyes of a monster that menaces. 
Look past undrawn shades for people that pass in the street. 
Passing oblivious, restless, foreboding, horror-seized 
Hundreds and thousands of times, at noon and at midnight. 
To come here, sooner or later. 

By those two lamps two men are sittng, keeping watch. 
Always someone sitting, keeping watch. 
Smoking, yawning, saying little and listening 
For the tense ringing of a nerve-racked telephone. 
Spring and summer, and autumn and winter. 

This is the gate of despair, and of dreams that are nightmares. 

And here the dead go first when they begin 

The long, dark journey into deeper darkness, 

Down a black funnel that narrows faster and faster 

Through the grave's close trap-door to utter forgetfulness. 

The men who sit here learned their craft in Egypt before the Pyramids. 
They have made mummies before, and their eyes and their lips 
Look out of the living mummy cases and whisper tonelessly. 
As the priests of the dead at Luxor and Thebes whispered at night 

as they worked; 
Taking the senseless shapes that women bore and loved, and men 

married and traded with, 
Hiding horror and disease and the taint of tears in soft wrappings 

of silence. 

People who lie awake with nerves that twitch, go by and shudder. 
But a child pauses and looks at the two green lights and longs 

for them. 
And a man with a heart like a cracked egg shell, edges night after 

night nearer the great cracked window glass. 
Finding there before him the rest that he craves and needs. 
Knowing that in all the world this one dim room belongs to him. 
And his tired heart tells him. 

Death is one breath in an endless march of interminable atoms; 
Through night's long passionless ecstacy. 

Santa Fe 2 12 19 



21 
THE CORNER DRUG STORE 

The children love to come here. 

To sit on high wire stools before the big mirror, 

To hear the soda fountain sizzle and squirt, 

To play with straws and bubbles in tall glasses. 

And swallow frozen ecstacy by lingering spoonfulls. 

Here is one place where all are children, 

At one time or another, sooner or later, 

Sundays or holidays, particularly so 

Since the town and the state went dry last October. 

We are children before the news stands between two big front 

windows. 
Like a flashy display of children's toys at Xmas time. 
Where we see ourselves mirrored in toy magazines for toy people, 
And cheaper Sunday papers from Denver and Los Angeles. 

We are children at the candy countex-. 

We are children in a corner near the big mirror. 

Stocked to start ten beauty factories, wholesale; working overtime. 

With lip sticks and potted rouge, cold creams and face washes, 

Talcum powder, radium soap, liquid shampoo, hair removers. 

Blue Jay corn plasters, rubber reducers, electric vibrators. 

And superfluous vanity bags for superfluous women. 

Little walking vanity bags themselves of small envies and appetites. 

And small spoiled children. 

Tragedy walks here too among the children. 

As a huge cowman or sheriff's deputy walks with a sixgim half hidden. 
Tragedy comes on tiptoe to a telephone and whispers tensely. 
Tragedy stands twitching by a prescription counter watching his 

watch. 
Tragedy smiles thin-lipped at a friend, and stifles a cough. 
Hurrying away with a jjottle of Scott's Emulsion hidden in a muff. 
Tragedy feels a truss, and hungrily watches the children. 
Tragedy comes with a face no sane man might marry, and frowns 

at them: 

At the children for whom all our drugs and vanities are devised. 
The children for whom we close saloons and nurseiT windows, and 

make war and peace. 
The children who come here as their elders come here; 

From lonely ranch houses, shadowed adobes, furnished rooms, hotel 

lobbies, toy town houses. 
To buy aspirin and frayed aspiration in a rag time phono.graph record. 
To buy patent medicines and patent appliances for killing time and 

ring worms and cockroaches. 
For curing boils and boredom, facial defects and soul insufficiencies; 

To our temple of gossip and healing of all ills real and imaginary, 
To sit on a stool by a counter and swing their legs as the children do. 
To see life a spectacle and a drama, halt guessed and half hoped for. 
To watch it without them and in them in a great big mirror before 

them — 
On Stindays — and weekdays — and holidays. 

Santa Fe 12 8 IS 



22 



KOSARIO'S 

At the end of the street, on the roof of the shop, backed by blue ■sky. 
An old gray Mexican oxcart stands on solid wheels hand-sawed from 

logs that sawed the desert. 
Below in the ghost shop's windows are wampum and arrow heads, 
Spear heads and cherts of flint and black obsidian, bleakly mingled 
With Navajo bracelets and rings beaten and punched from dead' 

Mexican dollars. 
Pottery rain-gods with eyes of dead men peer at you. 

Inside in deep shadows are piles of dusty blankets. 

Woven by long dead hands that paled as the wool sucked out 

All the color from old lives till the last red thread was lost in grayness. 

Long lost Navaho sheep and Mexican flocks near Chimayo 

Fed and their blood beat red, and these stripes and wedges are left 

of them. 
Snow and midnight mix in one and the colors of springtime and sunset 
Lire i» a rainbow web of wool that Rosario spreads on the floor. 

Pottery from Zuni, Zia, Acoma, Laguna, clutters the dusty tables, 
With painted shadows of flowers and leaves and birds and chain- 
lightning 
Great black lustrous jars from San Juan and Santa Clara overshadow 
Hopi ladles and bowls, yellow and brown like the rocks of the mesas. 
Heavy stencillike patterns of fire and night from San Ildefonso and 

San Domingo mix 
With crude Tesuque ash tray., and little clay birds and animals, 
Striped, Bmeared. absurd, wierd, and naively bewitching. 
And black and gray prehistoric bowls unglazed, crooked, coil-woven. 

There are baskets hanging from rafters, baskets on floor and walls; 
Big Navaho marriage baskets with their mountains of upper and lower 

worlds. 
BlacK and white trays, Pima and Apache, spotted with shapes of 

small men and Gila monsters, 
Hopi placques, coarse of weave, some low-keyed, and some like fire 

and sapphire. 
Rotting bottoms of baskets made by hands that died a thousand years 

ago 
And two frayed sandal heels of yucca fibre from an Otowi mummy a 

thottsaiid years older. 



23 



Painted saw-edged dance sticks ending in birds and burros crowd 
Bucltskin and bead-tagged pouclies and purses in dusty show cases. 
Hopi Kachinas, masks and dolls, and shamans' dead magic are jumbled 
With carved and tinted tablitas, tall wooden tiaras for dances of 

dead men, 
And dead children's tufted rattles like slim war clubs of dim warriors 

with dyed hide sewn on them. 

In a corner a tall war drum blue and yellow as bare torsos of dead 

dancers, 
Stands beside a scarred metate that ground ghosts' blue corn and 

yellow com. 
There are horse hair quirts and leather quirts and belts of long dead 

riders. 
With the wicked Mexican spurs and the silver bossed and the braided 

bridles. 
And saucers filled with beads and coral, turquoise and opal and 

Mexican money. 

There is a huge old dusty safe that Rosario opens slowly, 

Where he hides dim writings of men long dead, and trinkets and 

jewels of long dead women, 
Names written large in three races' history, and mystery magnetized 

and tangible. 
In great Navaho silver bead necklaces with squash flower spurs, 

and in crosses and swastikas. 
Worn gold for fleshless fingers, and thin ear-loops for ears that 

hear nothing. 

He has old seals that stamped power on yellow papers. 

Cut by Greeks in Rome in the image of Rome's first emperors. 

And one that came down through a pope and a king and a viceroy, 

reveals Rosario's profile. 
Hard and shrewd and old as a Latin and an Indian, and loving all 

things 
That have gray power in themselves to make their keepers fit for them. 
And Rosario stands with his ghosts in his hands like a priest of the 

past. 
And a ghost of the pride and the power of Spain and the Pueblos that 

perishing persist here. 

Santa Fe 1 29 19 



24 



SAN MIGUEL 

The old Catholic college has a gray stone front of many windows. 
And I sometimes wonder where the eyes are that looked out of them. 
Little fledgling priests that were homesick often and lonely. 
Knowing as little of the world as a babe unborn and resenting it. 

Compline, vespers and matins, and the length of interminable litanies, 
Fasts and penance and prayers, forever, one after the other. 
Midnight masses and early wakings in winter, and stories and lessons 

to be learned 
Of saints in torment, tormented by a God men worshipped tormenting 

them. 
Stories that spoiled the summer sun, and made the spring a mockery. 

The little boy priests went harnessed in black and harrassed 

By memories of autumn days when apples dropped in their mothers' 

laps. 
Long mornings on mountains when they found the pinyon nuts and 

pitched their fingers husking them. 
Days when they watched lean horses and colts like a merry-go-round 

on shining circus days, thrashing dry wheat. 
When dust and chaff hung high in air in yellow beams of sunlight 

dancing for them. 

They have gathered ripe grain for the threshing in the chapel an'd 

the cloisters, 
Where gi'ay faced priests go round and round, black shadows of God 

and shamans of midnight. 
Pondering a pit of eternity, and heirs to all the terrors and torments 

of the ages. 
And the dim contagion grows where they shut up boys beside them. 
And drive lean horses of habit round and round, day by day on their 

lives. 

The old Catholic college is a gray barracks of bitterness. 
But birds build nests around it, the sun and moon regard it. 
As it looks across the valley to old gray stone walls of the State 

Penitentiary. 
And I like better to think of eyes looking out of its windows at birds 

winging to the mountains, 
Than of the downcast lids that sei-ve life sentences to habit here. 
For worshiping shadows ceaselessly and wronging life with frayed 

rituals. 

Santa Fe 11 18 18 



25 



THE OLDEST CHURCH 

There was a cross in the open here where the Padres planted Christ's 

standard, 
Dusty foot-soldiers of Spain and her church talking possession of the 

land. 
There was a cross of wood and a new strange shadow on the hills, 
And a deepening shade in the minds and wild hearts 
Of the Pueblos and nomads who watched it and hated it. 

There was a cross of metal in old San Miguel 
Before the Pilgrims set foot in the fog at Provincetown. 
There was a cross of metal in a cage of sun-dried mud. 
A cage that was made when metal first was forged and before it, 
When the first cavemen builders rooted raw trenches, and carved 
their rude dugouts. 

There was a cage of shadows here, and the Indians hated it. 
And they loved their kivas better, and there was bloodshed here, 
When the great Pueblo rebellion rose in a long brown tidal wave. 
And they stoned the priests and martyred them, and the robes of the 

mass were rent and defiled, 
^V^lere a sunbeam brightens a gray clay wall, and a motor glides 

past the last of the Trail to the Plaza. 

There was a cross of metal in the sword hilt of each Conquistador 
Wlio came and held the land and heard bronze bells and ate God's 

body here. 
In metal armor that gleamed in the light of tall pale guttering 

candles. 
And the men and the metal swords and lances, bits and spurs that 

rode the land and rowelled it 
Are lost like yesterday's snow, and these old mud walls and carved 

roof beams outwore them. 

There is a cross of wood in the open here on the tower of old San 

Miguel, 
Crowning a church like a slice of deeply eroded gray cliff or great 

clay bank. 
With two stone slanting butresses against the time-worn face of it. 
Propping the walls of a tomb of the past with flowers like canticles 

growing in front of it. 
A crumbling tomb in an older dome of God's blue beauty embracing it. 

Santa Pe 2 25 18 



26 



THE HA T SHOP 

There is a telephone pole near the First National Bank that the 

horses have chewed. 
Puye was standing tied there one day as I rode round the Plaza. 
I pulled up Gray Leg and peered past the leaf-sprayed shade of the 

hat shop window. 
Some one was standing inside with her profile pointing to a mirror, 
As Mike Armijo's pointer Lai stands when she flushes a bird. 

Some one was standing inside with one finger fussing with her 
curly hair, 

In a brown leather hunting coat, tan riding breeks and wrap-puttees 
as symmetrical 

As the sweet, slim curves their close spirals defined and clung to. 

Some one with a hat in her hand and four more on the counter be- 
side her. 

Some one all curves that clung ,and melted and mingled in motion that 
sang to me. 

She lifted the first, and she seemed to kiss and caress her small 

head with it. 
Kings have been crowned with less splendor and pleasure in living. 
She laid the red hat aside ,and the blue and yellow and lilac and 

black, and they all looked well on her. 
And she frowned a little and dimpled and smiled, and they all looked 

well on her. 
She sang a little softly, and shuddered at a hat of furred horror in 

the mirror behind her. 
As forest things stooping and drinking from a river, shiver at fear in 

monstrous fur that is mirrored close behind them. 

While she debated I discovered frontiers of the forest in the hat shop. 
With its bare hat forms like empty bird nests scattered about it. 
While she fluttered by the mirror like a bird that preens itself be- 
fore a pool that smiles at it, 
I believed that the first hats for women were singing birds' nests. 
With a plume or two thrust through one side as they tried them on. 
Naked and flushed and smiling as children who first discover beauty. 
As they discovered their own images in pools that smiled at them, 
and barely knew them. 

Santa F6 12 5 18 



27 



THE TEA ROOM 

There used to be a red parrot swingng over the doorway. 

Time and the winds outwore it. 

Now all the parrots are inside, but Vera Deane insists 

They come with new novels in their muffs, and they go with stale 

gossip in their mouths 
"My dear, you musn't quote me, but between you and me and that 

telephone pole" — 

Some day a younger Homer will wrte an epic of small-town telephones. 

They borrow the use of hers and she doesn't like it. 

When she is busy behind the screen they start new scandals. 

And the red parrots on the walls and chintzes chatter and sneer at 

them. 
And the green parrots on the hand bells preen their painted feathers 

and grin at them. 

She brings us tea in yellow cups on red and green tables. 

Over the mellow brew they perpetrate eternal platitudes. 

And scatter litle dry social lies as they cnimble bread and cake crumbs. 

They sip straw-colored complacency for the tame little snobs that 

they are. 
And their souls are as brittle as china they chip, the lying little souls 

that they are. 

She has made us a clearing house of small lies and smaller jealousies. 
That she sells with her candies and her cakes, that we do not suf- 
ficiently thank her for. 
For lies must be cleared as coffee must be cleared before the truth 

in them is fit to lie awake with. 
And the wives clack back to their men at home and treat us more 

humanly for it. 
And I saw a prettier girl, even than V. D. there yesterday. 
And our tea room that tagged four divorced last year, has mothered 
eight weddings this winter already. 

Santa F6 10 22 18 



28 



THE BANK 

They have gutted the Bank Saloon and sold the stock. 

But they left the big game heads, and the glassy eyes look down 

Where big men clinked down big silver dollars with big guns belted 

to them, 
And drank big drinks of forty rod, and filled their hip pockets. 

They had strong stuff like dynamite to get quick action when it was 

needed. 
When the West was one great construction camp, and shoot slugs In 

strong men's guts; 
To bore through blizzards with them, when the fit stood up and 

survived, 
And the weak went to hell in a hurry, and a man tied tight to his 

friend. 

Big men started big things here and planned bigger ones. 

The army went and the cowmen came, prospectors plunked down 

nuggets. 
And juggled quartz with sparks in it that set eight states afire. 
And harnessed railroads to cities, and ditched and harvested deserts. 

Shades of the shaggy old timers, trappers, hunters and trailsmen. 
Section hands, congressmen, cowboys, governors, mule skinners, 

sheriffs, miners, state senators. 
Linger here and look at shop girls with curls like Mae Marsh 
Wrapping up boxes of candy fresh from Chicago for lungers from 

Boston in sombreros. 

A cigar clerk watches two high school pool room boys piking at a 

punch-board by a soda fountain, formerly a bar. 
And school girls dancing with the grandmothers between movie shows 

at the Paris, 
On the floor where the tenderfeet walked in the air to the sound of 

the bullets splintering planks. 
In this place that they call a cabaret, which is French today for a 

rubber-stamped dance hall. 

New York 10 29 19 



29 



THE GARAGE 

The gray stucco garage lies just back of the Plaza. 

By the doors are two gay painted birds that the Pajarito cave men 

put on pottery. 
Inside is a prison for speed with two greasy pits where they torture it. 
And a boy at a vise on a grimy bench is filing new links for its fetters. 

The boy at the bench has broken bronchos 
And he feels as often as not that his motor cars are alive, 
On his flat gray greasy stable floor standing still for him, 
And lolloping by outside and ripping and snorting. 

He thinks it is great tc bridle something that bucks 

With stuff that is stronger than rope or rawhide and cinch it. 

He has been here only six weeks and he hasn't had time to get 

homesick 
For the far dim ranges at dawn and the wind on the warpath. 

It feels good to be here in the hot throbbing heart of the town, 
To set a turn buckle on things, and to mix up with every one's life 
To make of speed a modern commodity as simply sold 
As the water one turns on and off in any one's bath room. 

Out in the old livery stable yard they are staking an extension. 
And burning up rickety stable hacks and sunwarped carriages. 
That tarried the passion and pathos of the past, and its crime and 

adventuring. 
Through fifty years of the days that are done to its homes and hotels 

and the trains and the state capitol. 

New York 10 29 19 



30 



THE SWIMMING POOL 

There is a swimming pool in an orcliard on a side hill, 

With a rough stone rim around it, and limpid laughing water running 

and diving 
From a sun-lit irrigation ditch, splashing and flashing into it. 

The trees grow close around it and shelter and shade it. 
Red barked apple trees, red as the clay of the path that tiptoes down 
From the house where the girls are hidden, and the morning breath- 
lessly waits for them. 

Sunrise liDgers to see them running lightly on tiptoe. 
Slim as two boys in their trim boys' bathing suits that cling to them, 
Down the red path where white apple petals fall on them lingering. 

Birds In the branches sing to them, the lights and the shadows bring 

to them. 
Something soft as a butterfly's touch, and the swish of flowers and 

dew on swift bare arms and feet. 
Feeling earth and air as they fleet; and the flicker of wings, of leaves 

and of light all thrill in them. 

Branch tips touch them brushing by, breezes clutch their lips and their 

hair. 
The color of the sky and the scent of the day is sweet to them while 

she still is a girl to greet them. 
And the water ripples to meet them, and splashes and flashes and 

dimples and plays with them. 

The sun climbs high to spy on them and to diy their hair as side 

by side 
They sit on the round stone rim of the pool with their little toes 

tickling the water. 
And they laugh at the light and new nests in the trees and a little 

gray kitten that cralws to them. 

The snow of the mountain comes closer today like the warmth of the 

spring to them, 
Like the buds that burst, the petals that fall, the sap that rises, the 

grass that grows, the breeze that blows, the scent and the song 

that flows to them. 
And every spring of all time is a pulse that quickens, a voice that 

wakens, a smile that trembles in them. 

For life today in Santa Fe on the last day of April, 
Is a girl half naked and wholly happy smiling and sunning herself 
On the mountain rim of a world of light and the sky's high bright 
blue swimming pool. 

Santa Fe 2 2S 19 



31 



THE STUDIO 

There is a great gray north window and a big red brick open fire place, 
With a noble red brick shelf above the fire hole bearing pipes, Hopi 

and Tesque pottery, rain gods and ash trays. 
There are coal black jars of San Juan with pussy willows in them on 

the adobe window ledge. 
And a painted jar from Zia crowded with brushes to the right of tbem. 
Between them red, blue, yellow, and speckled ears of corn and twisted 

paint tubes. 
And beyond them a hillside of snow and a sky too gray for painting. 

On a small table by the fire stands a green typewriter backed by a 
yellow placque from the Second Mesa. 

A larger table by the window is stacked with books, papers, ink, 
tobacco, hunting knives and photograph prints and plates. 

There are two tall easels splashed with paint in front of a desk and 
a gi-amaphone cabinet. 

One of them bears a thumb box sketch of a canyon road with a big 
blue mountain beyond it; 

And that road goes winding away all night and day to new wonder- 
lands. 

One of them carries a great brown picture of the Pueblo at Santa 

Clara, 
With three clay bee hive ovens in the foreground grouped like three 

mountain peaks. 
And the blue and green mountains beyond them carry the lines and 

contours of the Pueblo roof line to the sky line. 
There are streaky shadows of vigas, and slanting ladders and scaffolds 

like well sweeps. 
And the blue of a rifted sky comes back to blue shadows that seep 

through the ground. 

A black and white dog sprawls slack by a fire that smoulders gray 

and black. 
A man in khaki with a brindled cat in his lap writes on blue paper. 
A man with a grizzled beard and a big pipe in it clatters at his table 

in the corner. 
For today is too gray to paint in his laboratory of light in the hills. 
The experiment smoulders like the fire while he fusses with old 

photograph plates. 
Till the sun brings out new and brighter precipitates dripping from 

the tips of his bmshes. 
And the lenses of his eyes clear, as the great lens of the sky clears. 

Santa Fe 12 IS 1-8 



32 



CASA PINTADA 

Around the long table with two stained wood benches. 

We sat and ate and drank and spread out books and pictures; 

Indian colored drawings inevitably authentic. 

And tags of last year's New Art, already stale and ludicrous. 

We opened books for two years with little wrangling. 

252 volumes of New Poetry stacked on shelves or slung in corners, 

22 varieties of monthlies, weeklies, dailies and quarterlies dribbling 

and quoting it. 
We read proofs and smiled, or pinned ribald rhymes to them. 

Poets and painters darkened the doors or tapped on the windows. 
Poets cleaned pipes in corners, or orated in full focused candle light. 
Poets and painters debated of Art and its Mission and their Mission 

interminably. 
Poets lounged on the porch, and looked at sunsets and stars, and 

silently escaped to them. 

One of them taken to task concerning his own stolid egotism. 
Discoursed of painted women, painted houses, painted poets and 

painted painters briefly. 
"The virtue of this gray adobe in the mountains", he said 
"Is not the red strips of paints and the framed paint patterns on 

the walls. 

"It is a house of life on the loma, for all its frivolities. 
"People live here and grow, and come and go, and remember it. 
"People are better than poems, and houses are better than pictures. 
"Homes are better than art shops, and whoever talked shop in a 
dream?" 

Santa F6 12 14 18 



33 



THE OLD BELLS 

Two old bells hanging in a garden back of the Sisters' Sanitarium, 
Swung on a gray wood frame the height of my ears and my eyes. 
I had passed them a hundred times before, and never discovered them. 
One day from Gray Leg's back beyond the old adobe wall I watched 
and wanted them. 

Old bells that are silent make the most beautiful music, 
Like lips that are dead and loved and kissed by time's slow shadows. 
By the tender touch of the years and their children remembering 
Something that dies and yet lives in the soul of all silences. 

They thrill to the clangor of old days when they flung far their 

challenge, 
Heralds of the high God of Spain to the tribes of the hills and high 

plains. 
Tolling the people to prayers and dead masses for the dying. 
Calling brown kinsfolk to weddings, they clapped their bronze heels 

as they danced. 

They live at the summit of life and then sank to quiescence. 
Time has left them alone with the flowers and the winds and the sun 
To whisper back to the birds, and rin.g back muted centuries. 
When the snow falls softly and stirs them, or a butterfly poises on a 
bell. 

Santa Pe 12 20 18 



34 



THE BUND WOOD CHOPPER 

Where the Acequia Madre glides like a snake below the road. 
In the shadow of a low adobe stable and a pile of logs man-high, 
Big and brown, rotting and charred, with ridges of snow on their 

spines. 
Backed by a cone-shaped foot-hill, through two spider fingered trees; 

I aaw a shape like an ape in stained overalls, 

Crouching low at the end of a cross cut saw as long as himself. 

He leaned on it, swaying it awkwardly, playing strange music, 

With the rending of ore from rock and the crash of falling trees in it. 

Till his big fiddle bow of steel had swept the last wet cutting away. 

He laid the end of the log on the chip packed ground like a headless 

idol. 
He seemed to kneel before it as his clean axe rose and fell, 
Its keen edge always in line with a line through the middle of his 

bead, bis spine and his hands. 
And the line through the middle of each round and half and quarter 

log was as clean 
As the cleavage, timed and exact, of close set machinery. 

When he had finished his stint he felt for his faggots and got up 

with them. 
He went on over the water with one foot so close to the edge oT 

the bridge, 
Where no guard rail was, that I wanted to call out to him. 
Children going to school passed him and followed him, 
Making no more of him than the snow on the hills or vhe mud on the 

road, 
Wbere my ape-man at last, erect and assured, was rounding the turn 

of the road. 

Santa Fe 1 30 19 



35 



ARTURO 

He wears a smeared red sweater. 

His faded blue overalls gape at the knees. 

His shoes are shaky. 

His hat is dusty and black and half holes. 

He walks into our kitchen and sniffs at it. 
He walks into our dining room and looks at me. 
He says to me, "Hello, hello, you bueno?" 
And religiously I salute him in turn, 
"Hello, Arturo, you bueno?" 

His eyes are big and black. 

His lips are large and Latin. 

Hij nose is large and fit for smelling at 

Meals his sister, Rosario, makes for us. 

His face is large and it needs to be washes. 

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, 

Thursday, Friday, Saturday. 

His years are four and a half. 

His face is the face of a masterful lover of living. 

Wise without knowing it, equal to everything. 

Slowly alert and sufficient to time and itself. 

His stare is the stare of youngest New Mexico, 

Pondering life in a puddle of sunlight. 

Wondering what we painters and poets In Canyon Road make of it, 

And what all this big world Is about. 

His eyes are two round interrogation points. 

His voice is the echo of an older wisdom. 

And I know some day or other. 

When I am half the world away from Santa 16, 

In some land of the Latins where life Is a matter of minutes and 

seconds, and centuries, 
I shall see and hear him. 

I shall have him coming, standing, pondering, questioning. 
Like a lesser Pan and a faun and a hybrid of pixies and cherubim; 
With his black eyes of life, and his small voice of life that insists 

and persists. 
I am sure that at last I shall answer his slow repetition 
"Hello, hello, you bueno, you bueno? 
Arturo". 

11 10 18 



36 



THE YELLOW KIVA 

There is a sprawling yellow kiva in our little town, 

With a ground plan looking like a gi-eat lop-sided H, stenciled by 

tribal tradition. 
On forty-eight states, here and there. East and West, in ideographs 

crudely inconclusive. 
Some of us say it stands for hell today; some have a hope it may 

mean heaven. 

The cliff dwellers may have known better when they made their 

kiva capitals: 
Round ,lrw-ra!tered, intimate, with room for a hearth fire in the midst. 
We have tiled our larger lodges with tainted ballots, talking paper, 

dirty green backs, louder yellow backs. 
Oui' State Capitol puts up a front; and falls down, when you look at 

it behind, like most Americans. 

We have paid loo much paper money and hard money for wide stair 

cases and long and lofty corridors. 
Building a sounding box of Babel full of pigeon holes of purpose 

weakly standardized; 
Dusty office rooms where time clock type writers transcribe quantity 

production; we have made the place a mill 
For little shoddy private grafts, and public grabs of a state's greater 

greediness. 

Boy orators orate in our Senate and our House; paid interpreters 

translate through two languages, 
Latin to Nordic, and Nordic to Latin; Spanish and English mix as 

they can; 
Smelting man. and metals unmined; tongues of smothered fire tire 

ears unresigned 
To the endless wasting of words and time paid for, and loose power 

in our mountain power house. 

Sometimes it seems the old kivas were better, with their hearth-fires 

for our fevered haste; and their well-weighed sentences, 
As the peace pipe passed, of wise men who spoke, pondering their 

words, face to face; 
Without middlemen or scare heads to exploit or distort the sense of 

the tribe and its purpose in time. 
Sometimes it seems God Almighty's prize fools are those wiseacre's 

in Washington who would civilize the Indian. 

We were going away, and looked back at that power house of machine 
waste planted on our plateau. 

Over it floated, faded in warm sunlight, the flag that means most to us, 
time-stained and rubber stamped; 

Like one tattered wing of freedom we must fly with; somehow; some- 
where; somehow we remembered 

The old kivas' flag tipped ladders — till man's Ladder lifted there. 

Santa Fe 4 29 21 



37 



THE PARIS 

Paris blazed by night, bridging San Francisco Street. 
Througli part of the war we watched it and worried a little. 
By day the letters paled in the beauty of the mountain west of it. 
And Paris and the war were five thousand miles away from us. 

We had not thought of the Paris of cow punchers and counter jumpers, 
Fanning a cayuse through forty miles of moonlight, and wallowing 

desperately 
Out of gray ruts of shop aisle and street, and dreamles.s staring and 

sleeping. 
Or of the Paris of the old who have been there, and may not go back. 

In a cold cave of germs where ill-washed people coughed and flirted 
Once we saw Olive of the Studios caught in a gieat gray spider web 
That some one flashed a light on, and she shook it with her posturing, 
(Like live bait in a trap to tempt other girls like herself, 
And a mannequin ghost for furs, frocks and motors they framed 

her in,) 
Never to emerge from the net of quicK returns, in color and light, 
A voice that sang when it spoke, and a warm and vibrant reality. 
Truer than herself and the startled hearts of her hearers. 

"It's the Easiest Way all over again", said Irene. "Let's get out 

of this". 
So for a year we soaked ourselves in the sun and snow on the 

mountains. 
And we passed the Paris at times with eyebrows lifted and slightly 

superior. 
We who knew Paris and the arts, and all men publish about them. 

Thanksgiving night Pershing's Crusaders compelled us. 

And something rose in our souls, and pushed its way and thudded 

Through the pulsing hearts of the rest that pushed the Huns from 

Paris, 
With shoulder thrusts at spaded earth, and beams bridging ruined 

rivers, 
That rippled in a tide of living and lifted us. 

Suddenly we perceived the purpose of this playhouse of starved people. 
We who had starved for the great free swing of something high as 
the stars; 



38 



People who strive for Paris and the child in their hearts two nights 

a week; 
People who howl at custard pies slapped in your face, and are more 

avid for adventure. 
Even for farcial and thrilling acrobatics, than the vapidness of trade 

vampires. 
Thrilling a little to filmed wickedness of underworlds waked in 

themselves and sickening of film sentiment. 

We saw how stark contrast of light and shade come first in the 

ground and growth of things, 
Wliere the roots of the soul still struggle in the ruts and mud of the 

road. 
For earth had eyes before ears, and howls and shrieks before cadenced 

voices and muted imaginings. 

And Centaurs, Vikings, Attilas and Punchinellos, before Paris; and 

these people 
Were wiser for themselves than we were and the film spiders who 

sold and seduced them. 

For who has seen save by flashes at sunrise and sunset, the color 

and flowering of heaven? 
Or heard its voices yet but in swift and staggering action of cyclones 

and thunder storms? 
But we all see the stars at night on a screen of essential reality. 
And we went out beneath them, and planned for Paris as we walked 

through it. 

Santa F6 12 3 18 



39 



HOTEL DE OLID 

We have called it a bleak old barracks, but it belongs to us. 

It is bright enough when it waits for the midnight train from Lamy, 

Gleaming from blackness like a porter's teeth in a desert-bound 
Pullman, 

And like the car an ante-room to kings and queens that travel in- 
cognito. 

Youth lay awake here all night devising miracles. 

Love slept softly at last the happiest night of its honeymoon, 

Romance marched up and down shadowy corridors marking mountains 

by moonlight. 
Adventure stirred to a sunrise, and death the great adventurer set 

spurs at twilight. 

History wrote new pregnant lines, and staged strange meetings above 

stairs. 
Politics played queer tricks whenever the state legislature was in 

session. 
Art could color its own, and science came seeking fossil wonderlands, 
And keys to the truth of life that lived and died here before Columbu.? 

came and Corona,do. 

And the common people came, as still they come today, 
To the winning of the West and the magic that still thrills in it. 
And the townsfolk came to meet their friends and speed their parting. 
Where once they danced all night, and nodded to eternal after dinner 
orators. 

We have come from the dust of the desert and wallowed in its big 

white bath tubs. 
We have loafed and written picture post cards, and scanned Indian 

blankets and pottery. 
We have thrilled to news of war and peace, and idly wondered 
Who was that man in miner's boots, and the girl with a face like 

Faustina's twin sister. 

One night the lobby looked like a bank of life and a clearing house. 

People came and went, and put tired bodies and souls in deposit. 

To withdraw them next morning or three days later from vaults of 

sleep and of silence. 
Once it seemed to us like a club of the country we stood in on 

sufferance. 

Santa Fe 12 IT T8 



40 



THE OLD ADOBE 

A brown mud box some one dumped by the side of the street, 

It stands where time left it and fancy forgot it, 

With two smeared windows that squint on each side 

Of a dark and toothless door and a doorstep that sags like a lip. 

But childrens' eyes look out of its windows still. 
People coming and going are a daily bread to it. 
And the breath and the sound of life still comes from it, 
Where two old women in dusty black stand by the sagging sill and 
and whisper in the shadows. 

They stand in the shadow of the past and smile at it. 
They are living in longing and memory that walks with it, 
Through the dear, dead days that are gone, now dearer than ever. 
And the very voice and soul of the past that is pain and prophesy. 
Stirs the dim lips that slowly part and smile at life and repeat: 
"Buenos dias Seiior. si, buenos dias Seflor." 

Santa Fe 11 7 18 



41 



PENITENTES 

Ten half naked men are marching, 

Like boys following their leader, flogging themselves, 

In a staggering file down a stony trail near Taos. 

Their yucca scourges drip and their drawers drip red on the stones. 

Their brown backs are raw and rutted and slowly shuddering 

With writhing nests of red snakes that feed and breed on them. 

Like writhing snakes of blood in brains beating to bursting. 

Little gray snakes of pain writhe and strike 

In wild brown faces set and distorted like masks 

Of something starker than bull-fights, burnings and rackings, 

That persist and insist in pain's surgeons and Inquisitors. 

This is the torture of self linked breath by breath, stride by stride, 

stroke by stroke. 
Like the intimate tearing torture of lovers begetting birth pangs. 
With the shuddering torture of brothers in blood's burning sacrament. , 

Their women follow, and shudder or thrill to them. 
Children follow and whimper, but half grown boys are burning to begin. 
Mothers look on and loathe it and women unwedded and ripe. 
Fear and hate a greater cruelty than women's cruelty. 
And a redder ritual than any woman's ritual, 
And a wilder madness than any woman's madness, 
As they march to the cross that stands at the end of their road 6f 
the cross. 

There for a moment of suffering and torment. 

Beside men and boys who gash themselves with cactus and writhe 

on heaps of it. 
The supreme personage in this drama of pain that is older than all 

actors. 
Pain and the will to pain that is old as blood is. 
Old as the heart of life that stirs and beats and throbs and flogs 

in men and women. 
Pulsing through their lips and tongues, and breasts and fingertips. 
Through their maddest emotions and passion's pale and poignant 

intensities of tenderness: 
Christ's old prototype, alive and adored today. Good Friday, in Els 

valley by Taos, 
Naked and ecstatic, is waiting for the rest of them. 

Santa Fe ' 2 27 18 



42 

SANTA FE FORENOON 

The foothills are striped with long shadows of little pinyon trees. 

They are brindled, tutted, sleek and rounded. 

And they seem to stretch ever so little. 

Like cats half asleep in the sun — one yawns at me. 

The little brown adobe houses perched between their paWs. 

Love them and cuddle closer to the earth they grow from. 

The road to the canyon rising slowly and twisting. 

Lies like a piece of tangled fishing line they have tired of playing with. 

A lizard in the sun slides past with a flicker of his tail. 
And a little river in a crease of the hills glides by as silently. 
The grease-wood is gray again. Its yellow flowers have faded 
To the tint of the cottonwoods faintly turning and barely swaying 
Above gray trunks that dusty brown and tawny bronchos browse 
between. 

And my thoughts are yawning thoughts that browse with them, 
Past the smel' of ripening apples in the orchards and the grease-wood 

by the wayside. 
Past the purple lustre of cabbages in the garden where our red hens 

are hunting. 
Past a dark green tide of alfalfa lapping past fence post after fence 

post, 
Up to the red hillside of the stone crusher where the picks of convicts 

flicker on the skyline. 

On the brown road ruled between the green alfalfa edge, and pinyon 

trees that tuft the ridge, 
Two Mexican women in thin black skirts and shawls are tracking 

to town. 
And behind them a brown boy and three gray burros. 
With firewood bound round backs and flanks in huge brown horse 

shoes go silently. 
And the whole is a frieze as old as the brown and umber vases of 

Mycenae and Corinth — and older. 

There is a patina of days of dust and slow delight on this pattern of 

the world today. 
There is a gray glaze like the glaze of olives and old olive trees in 

Italy on this brown and sun-burned pottery, 
A gray glaze and patterning of shadow on walls and stones. 
On garden soil and roadside and hillside. 

And higher than all, and harder and softer in day's mirror 

There bums a blue flame, cloudless and flawless, stirless and 

mellowing 
The earth and all that grows from her, the yellow apples on the bough 

beside me. 
And a million aspens turning yellow at last on a huge round shoulder 

toward Truchas. 

And a mountain that I love, like a girl half waking. 
Thrusts from the crumpled folds of the foot hills' spotted coverlet. 
An elbow white and shnlng as the snows the clouds come close to, 
And yawns — as she smiles — at me at the top of the morning. 

Santa Fe 19 13 18 



43 



THE TOWER 

There is no cloud in the world today. 
And the sky is blue beyond belief or desire, 

Blue light that knows no shadow; the horses stand motionless 
High in the middle of the mountains, on the top of the tower of the 
world. 

Round us the ranges run and eddy and circle. 

Could one but creep past the last and peep from the parapet 

Into the splendor of space without shadow or mist: 

One might see stars for pebbles around the rounded rim, and the 

hollow below it 
Of a pool of clear spring water with his own soul for a still face in it. 

This is the tower of Maya; they pitched the blue sky for a tent on it. 
And round the parapet sleeping lie the last shapes of illusion; 
Mountain on mountain mixed and asleep in the sun's vast, silent 

seraglio; 
Evereywhere breasts and hips of women, shoulders and flanks, 
Stirless, strong and remote, the mothers of mothers forgotten and . 

older 
Than the first flower that bloomed or the first river that ran. 

One could see sea nymphs there, bathing and basking. 

Shapes that swim in the light and float on blue air like foam. 

On the verge of the surf of the ranges where the great earth waves 

gather. 
Billow and come like combers suddenly frozen and fixed; 
Power and purpose that pulses eternally, shaped and reshaped. 

Here the Kindler of stars colored the power of His purpose. 

Drew from the sea its depth of shadow and sunlight. 

Rippled the notes of Hs song that soars to a snow peak suddenly; 

Falls to a valley and rests; here the Forger of words 

Made for the dumb a sign till the fires of His forging were finished, 

And set it spaciously forth to wait and bear witness. 

Till the riders awake and arrive at this Vision of Maya's tower. 

Santa Pe 11 2 18 



44 



STILL LIFE 

Cold clear dawn on a world that wakes from huddled sleep — 
A wide window sill lifted twelve inches to let in the day, 
Six feet from my pillow at six; white sky, shadow cultures below 
In a long oblong microscope slide that daybreak slowly focuses. 

Static imensities emerge through the long blue profile of the main 

range. 
Sloping slowly to the right in a sky line that sings and cannot cease. 
Blue gray valleys of shadow and snow beyond grow more beautiful. 
Below the low brown adobes flatten frosted roofs in parallel planes. 

Leafless trees stenciled on the sky line lift to the levels of a massive 

of mountain tops. 
Forming a net work for fancy that waits for birds winging back, 

singing spring — 
Nests growing warm, living leaves of emerald cells netting together in 

new blue April weather. 
Those frozen fringes sway ever so little, as a little cool breeze starts 

to eddy and stir. 
One black bird, drifting down dawn, lights on a bare boujh; and the 

sap stirs underneath. 

Santa Fe 4 16 21 



45 



STAR SPRAY 

My cot is set in the midst of mountains and stars. 

Tlie mountains are dull and low on a sky line flattened by starlight. 

The stars are too many to count or confute, and I turn from them 

To a peach tree, half stripped, that stands in the center of our orchard. 

Our orchard is a garden of dreams, of stars tangled in fruit trees. 
They are sheep caught in thickets, 
They are apples of silver that shine, 
They are birds that have homed to new nestings. 

They are silver ships stranded in shadowy bays with jungles joining 
far margins. 

Our orchard is a garden of truth, and star spray in fruit trees. 

Like liglit filtered through to sea slugs on sea weeds in rock pools 

where the surf crashes thundering. 
For we live in the shadow of a wave of all life that curls and imperils 

and impends. 
And we live in the hollow of a pulsing of being that is breaking, 

and rending us. 

And jungles and sheep folds, passage of birds and landfalls of sailors 

are all crushed together and constrained 
To the urge of an impulse that throbs overarching, and stresses far 

forelands of night, 
Where meteors and stars are the froth and the foam of a comber of 

midnight that menaces 
Earth and our orchard and island that crumbles, assailed 
By the crash and the gride of the drift of the stars, and the beat of the 

surf of all being. 

Santa Fe 14 7 



46 



WINTER MIDNIGHT 

There are triptyches, panels, lunettes, in Holland, Paris, Italy; 
That one might rent for a million or more i:or a life time. 
But I could give them all if some painter would paint me perfectly 
All that I see these moonlit nights from my tent's east gable, 
In two tall triangles my leaning tent pole parts and marries. 

It is all silver and white, gray and black with browns in it like half- 
charred charcoal; 

The tent and the pole and the stubble of the field in the foreground. 

The stripped fruit trees of the orchard with stars stabbing through 
them. 

The white wreaths of snow that climb higher and farther through the 
foot hills. 

And a lean sky line climbing past thin branches to a star poised 
near a peak in fathomless grayness. 

It is all silent, cold and still. 
And I wake and dream and wake to it again. 
Till a faint gleam of gold from the forecourt of morning 
Thrills in a gray adobe window to the right of me. 
And flashe.s and beckons to the sunrise. 
Waiting and welling behind that slate gray eastern range. 
Waiting to leak and to flow and to flood and to pour past the peaks 
and the passes. 

V Santa F6 11 22 18 



47 



WINTER MORNING 

The sky is as gray as the glass of the studio window. 
The telephone wires are thin blacli lines against it. 
The trees are as thin and gray and brown 
As sea weed in rocli pools unstirred by one ripple. 

The 'dobes huddle into the hillside, 

Lying low and lean like a hungry dog asleep with his nose to the 

ground, 
A spotted dog that is dirty white with the snow that still falls on him. 
The pinyons are almost black and as cold as the rest of him, 

A black wagon rolls slowly down the white road to Santa F6, 
With four small Mexicans huddled in cloaks and the driver's hands 

clutching like claws. 
Two dun cows and a brown horse browse in the greasewood by the 

river 
Sucking the dry dugs of earth, and their throats throb with the 

weight of her. 

A yellow dog snuffs out a cold trail through the greasewood, 

The gray greasewood with snow-white flowers that bloomed afresh 

this morning. 
A black broncho in a gray blanket with a trailing lariat runs kicking 

and bucking to the river. 
Trying to buck off the blanket of gray silence that sinks and wraps 

the world today. 

Nine blackbirds, like living notes escaped from the scale of slim bars 
Of frost rimed telephone wires, are darting and dancing 
Against the wide gray sky and the high white hillside. 
Like soaring chords of a song that leaps and lilts and persists: 
As swinging, singing wings beat up against the thin and slowly sifted 
snowflakes. 

Santa F4 11 24 18 



48 



WINTER NOON 

Gray Leg wound on and up in a snail shell spiral, 
Round a round brown hill that looked to me like a sea snail. 
He dipped down through a high arroyo of snow and red rocks. 
He slipped on the cold north side of a horse shoe ridge that rose, 
Like a giant fossil from the sea, stranded and frozen on top of the 
foot hills. 

He found an old trail that angled faintly. 

And he sawed back and forth and he jerked on and up. 

Past little red rocks and little green trees and white patches of snow. 

With his brown sides heaving and his heart beating between my legs 

when we halted. 
We started again and we mounted past the last brown bulge of the 

ground. 
And I swung him around to the west at last, and we watched all 

time together. 

We stood on the scarp of the world, and below us 

A wide brown beach spread past red buttes like rocks tumbling 

seaward. 
Below on upland levels toward Bernalillo the snow lay white and 

shining, 
Like sea sand wet by tides and sea ice thrusting landward 
Past snow-capped i-ocks that were the peaks of farther ranges. 
And the sun blazed out on it in golden channels like fiery water 

flowing and rending the floe pack. 
Beyond lay the lights and shadows and snow berg summits of still 

greater ranges. 

And the sun rose higher and higher. 

And the tide of life like liquid fire was widening. 

As the tide of white before it rose and widened. 

Rose from the sea and spread and fell in air waves whose fringes 

were snow flakes. 
The sun at noon blazed down on a snow fringed rock pool 
That the sea once made; and the waves of a greater sea 
That washed the whole world like an island when time was a babe 

in its womb. 
And the glaciers were the scouring of the long slow surf in it. 
And the ocean today is the dregs and blue ooze of it. 



49 



The clear air freshened around us. 

And played with Gray Leg's mane and our nostrils widened. 

My eyes widened and my thought grew greater at the sense and the 

thought ol: it 
As the world grew wider, and the air grew wider, and life grew 

greater interminably, 
Till all the sea was one rock pool; 

And main ranges low rock ridge.s of New Mexico under the sea. 
That plainsmen blindly believed long since had deserted us; 
The sea that was here, and is here, and will be 
When earth like a wave-washed rock topples down to be ground round 

to atoms. 

And I saw the sun in the sky, and I saw new clouds in blue water, 
Little light flecks of foam, each slight and white as a snow flake. 

And I knew that this snow was the froth of one wave in an eddy's 

little tumult of air. 
And I breathed in one breath and one drop of a wave wide as ocean 

and wider, 
That lifts to the light of the sun, and ebbs to the deepest pits of night, 
And knows neither tide marks nor margin beside or beyond them; 
That leaves our gray mountains like tangled tide ridges of sand. 
For a day on the way of all living, on the quest and unrest of the sea 

born slow spirit of man. 

Santa Fe 12 10 IS 



50 



THE RIDE HOME 

We rode home last night by the river. 

Turning to the right at the iron bridge with its frost rimed planks, 

We galloped by high banks till your flying shadow was lost 

In the matted shade of leafless ranks of willows. 

And I watched you bend and sway as Gray Leg threaded through them. 

We forded narrow channels where cold water gleamed and wavered 
Through a waste of sand and scrub where your shadow toiled like the 

feet of the horses, 
Through shapeless pools of dusk as cool and dry and shifting as sand. 
Where the shadows of the rocks were painted on white ice rims and 

snow islands. 
On the edge of a grease-wood pasture: and once more the willows 

swallowed us. 

We emerged in the middle of a valley that widened and climbed. 
Rising softly to meet the mountains as your breast sometimes breathes 

to them. 
And the moon was an open well head with all the silver in heaven 
Spilling straight down on your spurs and the bits of your bridle, 
Rippling away with the wash of the river, and the starlight leaked 
. through it. 

I let you ride before me: I wanted to watch you. 

With your slim ,straight back and shoulders, boylike and beautiful 

As your body that gripped your horse and silently swayed him; 

So your spirit sways your heart; you rode and you never looked back. 

ABd I followed your shadow that followed you, and loved it. 

Through a corridor of mountains that opened on the stars 
We rode without speaking a word and all the while we were drinking in 
The silver flood of moonlight that made the night a miracle. 
And I wanted to go sti-aight on and follow you 
Riding forever through space to the rim of the range and beyond. 
There in the air was our empire, and there we went ridmg, 
Riding on the moonlight rim of a planet that galloped through the 
night. 

Santa Fe 11 18 18 



51 



RITO DEL FRUOLES 

The Spaniards called it Pajarito because they saw ther 
Greater colonies of swallows' nests in taller mud banks, 
Where caves star the cliffs and the canyons run to the river. 
But something stronger and stranger lingers here like an echo, 
Like the sound of dry waters that run below these last year's nests 
of stone. 

The winds first sang here, dancing on rock pools and dizzy ledges. 
They ground grit in rock crevices in airy whirlpools. 
The caves grew and remained till men found and fashioned them. 
There was a sound of chipping of stone on stone, and of fragments 

falling. 
There was a sound of felling of trees with stone axes. 
There was a hoisting of vigas home and a building of balconies. 

The women ground blue corn in querns and sang to the grinding. 
They mado sandals of cactus fibre and wove baskets of reeds and 

grasses. 
The hunters brought deer meat home and the old men dried it. 
Boys stoned rabbits, girls made warm robes from furry skins sewed 

fast with sinews. 
Men found eagles' feathers that they traded for turquoise and obsidian 

for arrow heads. 
They made their first black pots from snakes of clay coiled outward 

and upwards. 
They harnessed the river with trenches, they stabbed the earth and 

pitted it with seed com. 

They made ladders of tree trunks that leaned and led to their great 

high cave of ceremony, 
With its rock half dome that shadowed the stone kiva they built there. 
Round and barely above ground like a bird's nest till they covered it. 
Lest any should lightly see their threshold to the underworld, 
Sunk in the center of the floor, that spirits like serpents come crawling 

through. 

They were primitive people, closer than today to their origins. 
Their racial memories reached to days when the first birds were flyiflg 

snakes with scales, and men fought them with flints and sling 

stones. 



52 



They pictured birds on tlieir pottery, they carved them on roclts and 

cliffs in petroglyphs. 
They saw serpents in the windings of rivers and the twistings of trails. 
The Avanyu, the great winged serpent, was the guardian of all springs 

and water sources. 
When he was angered they dried and men died, and his ways were 

past determining. 
They worshiped the eagles that fed on serpents before the Aztecs, 

their fathers, revered them. 

They were a bird-like people who fled from the tribes of the plains 
of torment. 

But steel and powder flew faster, and the swift horses of the Spaniards 
rode at them. 

On them Apaches and Navahoes who had crawled like serpents stalk- 
ing them, were winds to winnow them. 

They cut the trails to the fields, and the water trails and the hunting 
trails. 

Meanwhile the Avanyu was angered, and the water died and the 
people died. 

For they had no wings like the birds who flew to new nests and, 
full drinking pools. 

The sky was blue above them, cloudless, rainless, merciless. 

The rocks were as hard as before and as gray with no help or hope 

in them, 
The sun was bright as before, and it burned and tortured them. 
The snow was white when it fell like one breath of cool air on the 

fire of their fever and hunger. 
The wind was as free as before on wild nights when it hooted and 

yelled at them. 
The birds were free as before, their song was as sweet as before and 

rarer and dearer. 
And the last lovers clasped lean hands and lips, and the last old women 

wailed for the last child of the tribe and the ending of all things. 
The last water went with the last echo of its falling, the last tire fell 

with the last eyes that looked at it. 
And the serpents of shadow silently stole into the place and pos- 
sessed it; 
Till the white man came at last and cleared out drift-filled caves, and 

filled the empty city with his dreams of it. 

Santa Fe U 2 18 



53 



COKN DANCE, SAN DOMINGO 

Motors are planted in ranks in gray dust by a dusty gray church. 
Motors are plowing the roads from Santa F6 to Bernalillo. 
Horses are dancing along the dusty roads through the sand hilla, 
Indians on sorrel and paint ponies come trotting down distant trails. 
Mexican teams and toy burros are pushing through the crowd on foot 
to the Fiesta. 

Mass is still being sung; through the open door one discerns 
Shadowy worshippers kneeling and rising in ranks to slow chanting. 
Mexicans set up shop in stands, south of the Plaza and sell 
Candy, quirts, cigarettes, soap, Navajo bracelets and rings and raw 

turquoise. 
Indian women in dim doorways lift mottled pottery and toy bows 

and arrows. 
Children bring firewood and apples, and smoke rises fast from gay 

chimney pots. 

In the great square of South and North, of the summer and winter 

peoples, 
The crowd is gathering and black heads are showing in hatchway's 

of kivas, 
Like huge butt ends of logs protniding from earth and coated with it. 
Ladder ends slant from low tops with red feathered pennants at their 

tips. 
The church disgorges at last a crowd chromatic and intense. 
More and more heads of dancers are massed on kiva tops, looking 

around. 
Past the throng on the ground to strangers and friends crowning long 

roofs and crowding strong ladders. 

Domingo's Koshare appear like old heralds of tribal tradition. 
Green corn sheaves bound round their ears, black spots daubed on 

white bodies. 
North, South, East and West they start to report the land is safe for 

the harvest. 
One by one they return to begin the abundant fun of full harvest. 
When old gray grandsires frisk and grin, and each bin is full of 

speckled blue ears; 
And good spirits have smiled on the harvest. 



54 



Three hundred men and women begin to dance the great dance of 

the harvest. 
They come pair by pair in line like planted corn and they hold green 

sprigs of pine. 
And the rattle of elk teeth rattles and silvery sleigh bells simulates. 
The cackle of the pregnant corn in great heat, and the swish of winds 

like the swish of flames through corn fields. 
The women's black blankets are earth, and the long tassels of the 

men's trailing waist scarves 
Are trailing tassels of corn that is born of the heat of the harvest. 

They shuffle like the first slow days of faint greeu growth of the 

harvest. 
They circle and eddy as the suns and shadows of green growing 

circle and eddy; 
They stamp with furred feet and claws of wild things that crept anfl 

ran through the ranks of the harvest. 
They tramp with the dull weight of days that bore down hour by 

hour in great heat. 
And always the turpuoise green tablitas, tall woolen tiaras of the 

dancing women. 
Are the blue green tips of growing corn, and swaying flickering 

spear heads of harvest. 

They halt like the sultry heat of high noon in mid .summer. 

When the corn grows high though all earth is still, and stands still 

as it grows ; 
Till a wave of slow chanting and clamor of long drums stirs them again 
As low thunder stirs a sultry sky, and low drumming of rain comes 

closer and closer. 
To hearts that beat high in July growing glad in the hope of the 

harvest. 

AH day they advance and retreat through the heat of the dance of 

the harvest: 
Till the last motor rolls away, the last cowboy rides away, and the 

Mexican and Navajo riders. 
Like a painted frieze that flamed above the horses' heads, and the 

dancers' tablitas. 
Are scattered like colors of sunset ; and the Plaza lies shadowed 

and dun: 
And the last old Indian woman lets down her rusty sun umbrella. 
And lets herself heavily down a long and dusty ladder. 
To the feasting already begun, in glad homes of corn harvesting. 

Santa Fe 12 1 15 



55 



THE HERITAGE 

She wanted to go to a hut hospital on the western front. 
Because she got sick herself they would not let her. 
Then came the influenza, and in the midst of it 
She found a western front of her own, right here at home. 
Somewhere in northern New Mexico. 

Some of us know New Mexico as a land of beauty, 
A land of color, of romance, of mountains and mystery. 
A place for hunting, fishing, riding, climbing and motoring; 
A land of prehistoric ruins and ruins since the Spaniards came. 
Of cliff dwellings, terraced houses, Pueblo dances and dim rituals; 
A land of rattlesnakes and sage brush and red and black traditions. 
Of grim Penitentes who scourge and crucify themselves afresh on each 
Good Friday. 

Few of us know New Mexico as a land of squalor and gray ignorance. 
Of hidden villages and lone adobes where life is hard as it was in the 

ages of flint and of bronze. 
Of little efforts to live as pitiful as winter starved horses 
Wandering through spring time, staggering and dying 
In the running of new waters and the blossoming of fruit trees. 
In the blue of April's beauty and her showers of pink and white. 

But she knew them because they belonged to her; 
Hard by the valley of beauty, around the bend in the road. 
In the shadows of low foot hills in the windings of little rivers. 
In the sands of parched arroyos and dry ditches where the sickness 
lay heavy on the land. 

Little pitiful stories came to her by word of mouth. 

Of dead and dying mothers and babies starving and neglected, 

Of infected houses and infected wounds and sores that spread as the 

sickness spread. 
And because she cured one. and word of it spread, they sent for her 

and trusted her; 
People who never know a doctor from birth to death, because there 

are no doctors to seek them out and succor them; 
People who live and die as the beasts die. 
People who yet are human and remember her and love her. 



56 



She went with her mother and her little brown horse and mountain 

wagon, 
And her big knitting bag full of bandages and pads, lysol and aspirin 

and little bottles and tubes. 
She went with a white mask soaked in alcohol, and a love that was 

her whiter disinfectant. 
And they could not see her face clearly, but they knew the light Va 

her eyes. 
And they felt the healing in her hands in the shadows of dark houses 

and adored her. 

She went by day and night, in the magic of the moonlight on the 

mountains. 
Through the splendor of blue days, and golden sunlight glad and 

dear as the warm breath of life itself. 
Through a mountain world, and a warm mould of beauty that was 

made for beauty and belonged to her. 
Through a moonlit world of cooler, tenderer shadows of the truth 

that beauty barely breathes and promises. 
And from it all she took them something lasting in herself that they 

believed in and remember, 
Part of her heritage and theirs that life's true lovers share in shadowed 

sacraments in France and somewhere on life's lonliest firing line. 
This is the only real religion in the world that men and women live 

and love and die by and remember. 

Santa Fe 11 12 18 



57 



THE TRAIL MENDER 

We came back from the summit where snow rifts in August. 

We scraped past rock stairs, we slithered over shale slopes. 

We thrashed through aspen thickets where the horses nipped dry 

grasses. 
We stroked down the spine of a ridge and stopped to tighten cinches. 

We slid down guttered channels where the trail angled sharply, 
And twisted and snarled through great gnarled roots that held it 

clinging 
To the sides of a funnel in the hills; we plunged down shuddering' 

sand slopes. 
Till Puye stretched his steaming neck to the gleam of a stream in 

a canyon. 

Here there was quiet stirred alone by the splash of water that rippled 
From rock pool to rock pool; from shade pool to shade pool we 

threaded. 
Where the cotton woods stand in gray islands in seas of green grasses. 
And the trail wound brown between them, shining and warm in IBe 

sun. 

Near a six-inch ditch that brings living water from the Rifo 

Round a harsh hill shoulder evenly, we saw a lunger at work. 

Slowly he stooped, and with infinite care he pried and he lifted at 

A little dry pine tree wind-cast across the trail in the night. 

We were past before he had levered it down hill to suit him. 

I looked back and saw him picking up stones and trimming trailing 

branches 
That slap one straight in the eyes, and stooping again and again. 
And every line of his tired body was a line of life's gospel telling me: 

"Others may tread the high trails, taking earth by the throat on the 

way. 
They may breathe in half the sky at one stride but I cannot. 
They may seize the summits in turn like posts boys vault past at 

leap-frog. 
And watch all the wonder of the world suddenly spread at their feet, 

but I may not. 

Others scrape hand holds to see lightnings splintered on lone summits, 

Or feel the flail of hail and sleet on razor-edged ridges; but I 

Am grateful that life lets me live by great trees and green glades and 

bright waters, 
Smoothing the v/ay for the weak, and the strong that stumble and 

trip in the night." 

On the trail we all are keepers of. 

Santa Fe 12 10 18 



58 



GOA TS 

White, gray, brown, black, the goats track by together. 

Blending over and flowing around baby arroyos and humps in the 

hills. 
Like a brindled patch on the hide and the play of lean muscles on 

the back 
Of a sharp-nosed dog that pens them in the open persistently. 

They browse by old trails and the strength of the earth flows into 

them. 
The blue sky, the brown hills and the gray weeds are one with them. 
The she-goats chew their food and the sagging udders are filled, 
And the dog and his master are drift on the weight of the wave that 

moves with them. 

It ripples through worn channels and runnels in the hills. 
And the tide turns back at twilight and the goats go home again. 
With white milk for brown babieis, white sunlight liquid and warm. 
And the strength that they strained out of chinks in the rocks is 

strained again 
Into little, glad, greedy lips that lap, till the lips of brown mothers 

drink love deeply. 

Santa Fe 11 11 18 



59 



COYOTE 

He howls in the hunger of winter, 

Where a starved moon sinks into nothingness, 

Near an earth scabbed with shadow and leprous 

With livid patches of silver along her thin shoulders and flanks. 

He howls as a leper howls 

Wlien health and wholeness and human touch are taken from him. 

He howls as evil men must howl in evil dreams. 

Seeing lost happiness they maimed and murdered. 

He howls as a blind man howls when his eyes are put out. 

He howls as madmen howl at shifting shapes that trick and betray 

them. 
He howls as devils howl when Hell damns the innocent. 

He howls when the earth is sick and mad in wan winter moonlight. 

When ghosts walk thick, and wake and stir at the sound 

Of his long, laughing, wailing mocking, yelling ululations. 

He howls like a leper, a devil, a dead man, a blind man, a bad man, 

a mad man. 
He howls with the wailing of the winds and low laughter of snoV 

trolls that rick men to murder them. 

Santa Fe 12 8 18 



60 



PROCESSIONAL 

Coming down hill from Casa Pintada, past the Acequia Madre, 
Suddenly appeared at the end of the street plodding down Canyon 

Road, 
Five little white brides of Mary in procession, two women in black 

walked behind them; 
Five little girls bearing flowers in glass vases, and two women wifh 

yellow candles in their hands. 

Carrying candles In white and red bouquets, candles unlit the shade 

of pale gold; 
Going in golden sunlight to the great church of St. Francis, they 

went down through brown dust, through the mothers' month of 

May 
To the motherhood of Mary, of our Lady of Love who smiles mildly 
On all mothers and girls who go to her, and those others whose 

smiles is spring. 

Santa Fe 5 4 21 



61 



THE DIMPLE 

I have learned to love this land, 

As one loves the body of a woman one begins to possess, 
And the clouds in the skies that change and make her subtle alld 
wonderful. 

I love the swells and the troughs like the sea of her sky line. 

The sudden hollows and circling eddies of earth lying sunken and 

rliaaowed 
By the crest of the ranges. 

One day I found a dimple in the earth with flowers that thrilled in it, 
Behind a hill that hid it like yesterday's dear secret. 
And I made it a shadowy, dreamy funnel of delight and of peace that 
poured into me. 

Why should people think it any more shameful to love 

The dimples in a woman's body, behind her knees, below her shoulders, 

And in every fair and fertile fold of her; 

Than those in her cheeks and her chin? 

Santa Fe 3 4 17 



62 



THE SPRING 

The springs are hard to find 
In this old brown land of ours. 

But I know one that I found one day in November, 
High on the breast of a hill 
Heaving out of canyon, 

Like the heaving breast of the girl that climbed that trail with me, 
Till we fell on our faces side by side and kissed the still water to- 
gether. 

There were grains of brown sand in the still round basin. 

Cool and blue as the skies and her eyes with brown flecks in them, 

Looking out on a widening vista of space and of splendor. 

And a riot of red and gold, aspens and oak scrub that climbed to us; 

All the leaves of the year burning up for us. 

To warm our Indian summer, 

As all the year's waters were strained 

To make that cup cool for us. 

If I could find that spring again. 

And see her face again, 

Grave and glowing and good for me 

As the taste of that water was good for me, 

And feel the clasp of her hand 

As we climbed the rocks to the summit of the range; 

I could go back with her again 

To the days of life's beginning 

When we lay with our lips at the breast of the mother of all. 

Guiltless of sinning or sorrow or desire, 

And happy as children are happy. 

Santa Fe 11 20 18 



63 



LOST LAKE 

Two snow peaks looked down on it over their shoulders. 

As it lay in a green pit below them. 

And it smiled for one hour each day 

When the sun stooped stiaight down and kissed it. 

More still and cool than cloistered nuns and novices, 
It lay in the shade of the pine trees and mirrored stars more con- 
stantly 
Than any lake in the world, and the shadows guarded it. 
Many have fought to find it and failed for a lifetime. 

One I caught, looking down from my tallest snow peak's shoulder, 
The gleam of its water at noon, and I left all the world at my feet. 
And I went crashing down, thrashing down, through shale and aspens 

and pines 
Straight to the mark that I missed; and must climb to discover it 

again. 

Once in the eyes of a child that was a woman for a moment. 
As the sun warmed her and waked old and strange pregnant appeals, 
1 caught a light like the smile of Lost Lake, and I lost it 
When her heart that was hardly awake, lay asleep in the shadows 
again. 

Santa F» 12 11 18 



64 



TESUQUE CHURCH 

A blue square of sky with two bells in it 

Is fretted in the wedge of a lean white-washed gable. 

Below through a great gray square of shadow 

A woman in a pale blue blanket leans and looks out of the door. 

Beyond and above the flat white facade is blueness illimitable. 
And the great black and white bulk of the main range builds 

toward it. 
And the high white dome of Baldy, rounded and fuller than Fuji's 

high note of ecstasy, 
Swells to the greater dome of the sky's blue beauty forever and ever. 

Below on the steps of the church a row of Indian women and 
children, 

Two, doll-like, Japanese, red and remote, with eyes obliquely ob- 
livious. 

One in a purple shawl with a face like a fate intent and terrible; 

All with hard heavy black bangs falling low down brown foreheads 
are watching the dancing. 

Santa F§ 12 27 18 



63 



TEN CANDLES 

Before the gold and white altar in our old cathedral aisle. 

Before the painted statue of Christ with a burning heart and a scarlet 

robe, 
Before "they brought him to the temple" lettered in lace below 

wounded feet, 
Before two tall yellow candles unlit in brass candlesticks' yellower 

columns: 

In a brass skeleton lectern rack, with tiers of round and empty 

sockets 
Slanting up toward Christ, ten candles are lighted out of seven and 

thirty: 
Ten small white and gold ardent altar flames, burning softly and 

steadily. 
One is so near the end of its mission that the flame is taller than 

the whiteness that remains. 

Underneath, the bottom of the rack looks like the floor of a bird cage. 
Here is a no-man's land of dead candles, candles time has done with, 

charred and guttered out 
In the fever of a worship of wounds that burns before him, waiting 

for his Judgment Day; 
All the blood from the pale face of the girl who kneels here drained 

away to redden the burning heart and the scarlet robe of Christ. 

Santa Fe 4 3 21 



66 

THE CABIN 

The cabin has yellow log walls and a front porch with a hammock in it, 

And a great gray stone fire-place built into the side hill at the back. 

There are two big beds by the fire; and two long low windows be- 
side them 

Look up and down the valley of a river that slips through the arms 
of the hills. 

There is a row of books on the mantel that I made there. 

A row of pegs in a corner supports sweaters, slickers, frayed riding 

breeches and fisherman's waders. 
There is a typewriter on a table beside papers, newspapers, magazines 

and a cribbage board. 
There are trout rods, rifles, quirts on the walls, and webbed snow 

shoes for winter. 

There is a bay horse who puts his white nose through my window 

each morning I wake. 
And a black and white dog who sleeps on the foot of my bed every 

night, and shakes hand with me. 
There is a gray squirrel with fringed ears that cracks nuts on my 

mantel piece. 
And a boy who conies and plays cribbage with me, and finds worms 

for my fishing. 

All these are good in their way, and I manage to live with them. 
Like the pines on the mountains that march to the sky, and the 

river that runs to the ocean. 
But they all point to something above and beyond and inscrutable. 
They have taught me to reach out and take hold of life, and to tell 

of her. 

They have taught me to wake in the moonlight and want her. 
And to see in the shadow by the foot of my bed her small pair of shoes. 
And a little, light lacy heap on a chair, like a cloud half asleep in 

the moonlight. 
And a little gray gauntlet unmated all day on my table reaching to me. 

Sometimes 1 see it when 1 ride laid lightly on Gray Leg's shoulder. 
Sometimes I feel those little brown shoes in my hands when we 

climb the high trails. 
Sometimes I hear a voice that is tuned to the whisper of winds and 

the song of the river. 
Sometimes I see on the summits a face that the flush of the sunrise 

foretold. 

Sometimes when I write I feel two finger tips sealing my eyelids. 
Or someone saying "Who am I? Where am 1?" with the ghost of a 

kiss when the fire dies. 
Or a warm little hand half awake that reaches for mine when I wake 

from dim dreams in the midnight. 
But I think she comes closest of all when her profile is sculptured 

in shadow, 
And her feet falter closer to our cabin while we count the first stars 

in the skies. 

Santa Fe 11 15 18 



67 



THE SANTA FE TRAIL 

The high plains were a stage for it, the rolling prairies gave its tempo. 

The mountains were its climax, the desert its insistence, 

On this trail that tied together the tie ribs of a nation. 

This new wild folk migration that went traveling with the sun. 

By salt buffalo wallows, beside slow running rivers, 
Past mountain passes threaded by big horns and wild stallions, 
Over mesas gray with grease-wood, by foot hills cactus spined, 
Where snow that flecked the desert left blind stains from day to day: 

Across the great arena between Missouri and the Rockies, 

Past black stains of death's flUrk foot prints across the dreary plains. 

Where they burned brave men and women in the ashes of wrecked 

wagons. 
And Apaches and Kiowas, Utes and Sioux tore off their scalps: 

Where highwaymen murdered men who rode in low ox-carts and raw 

new Concord coaches, 
Mexicans killing Gringos, and Gringos scalping Greasers like Indiaiis, 
Where they buried bags of silver by tall trees on shallow river islands. 
And came back to find them sometimes; where they marked the trail 

with graves: 

Where the red men tombed their war chiefs on lofty sapling scaf- 
foldings. 

Wrapped in furs they stripped from women waiting underneath in 
winter to follow them, 

Where trappers piled up stones upon their silent partners lest the 
wolves should paw them out, 

Where blizzard-whitened mounds grew flat as sodded graves grow 
flat more slowly: 

Where the pack trains bore charred corpses on their sweating mules 

and horses. 
And Comanches with trained bell mares yelled, and shot stampeding 

them at night, 
Where ox-trains plodded steadily, and babes were born in canvas tilts 

to fill their thinning ranks. 
And men made love to women like lovers on sinking ships: 



68 



Where the buffalo ran in rivers on their northward spring migration, 

Black rivers splitting past still wagons like rocks, wild rivers stam- 
peding, black rapids overwhelming them; 

Where red rivers of prairie fires swept past the trail and wiped it 
out, 

Till men trod out the ashes in the ruts that time had worn: 

Where their escorts trotted in ragged ranks to the New Mexico bor- 
der line. 

Bearded dragoons in dull blue coats and dusty caps, and Mexican 
lancers in steeple hats and silver tricked trappings, 

Where red-shirted miners, and raw Forty-Niners in newly beaded 
buckskins, sang and shouted, betted and doubted death and tall 
stories. 

And gamblers like black priests of chance tried out their eyes and 
hands: 

Where fat French and Spanish priests and rawboned Moravian mis- 
sionaries 

Met and scowled or smiled at wayside weddings and christenings. 

Where lean New England spinsters stared at Mormon and Indian 
women and fat Latin prostitutes. 

And at last struck hands together by some death-bed, squaw and maid: 

The high plains were a stage for it, the rolling prairies swept it 

westward. 
Past the mountains, past the desert, past all suffering and dying to the 

fruit trees of Tesuque and the sunset. 
Where the buffalo ran, and the Indian rode, and the Lancers spurred, 

and the trappers tramped; and the world rolls after them. 
In a new steel folk migration just begun where theirs is done. 

Santa Fe 12 4 18 



69 
THE OLD DIM TRAIL 

The old, dim trail is gray and faint as a memory of many years ago. 

It sags down past the foot hills like a sick snake in autumn. 

It crawls through a shallow valley of bones that are bleached and 

lusterless. 
It sidles into a bone-dry arroyo and wearily heaves itself out of it. 
It inches past rock ledges bare and brown as the ribs of earth's rotting 

carcass. 
It is a fading trace of the past and of feet that have no power now 

to warm or wear it. 

It creeps to the loma's edge and laps over it. 

It falls into great new gullies that gash and distort it. 

Pitching past them, it persists through a shallow wash full of wagon 

tracks. 
Passing fence posts and telephone posts where men staked out two 

rods of it for a wagon road. 
It goes on beside a footpath by a fence at the side of a field, 
A field built up in shallow terraces with a gray ditch high and dry 

at the top of it. 

It points to Santa Fe that lies below it, 

A city old and gray in the gray dust of November under November 

skies. 
With the crumbling gray adobes in the foreground with their fruit 

trees. 
With its gray roofs in the hollow of its little hidden river. 
With one great gray dome that rises higher than the spires of tall 

poplar trees surrounding it. 
And the slow gray spirals floating light against the sullen, high, gray, 

northern ridge that dominates the whole of it. 

It lies there, nestling in the great gray hollow, 

Like a city long asleep and barely breathing, 

A city of gray ghosts of traders, trappers and trailsmen. 

Horsemen and hunters, soldiers and captains. 

Padres with their burros, bishops and governors. 

Mothers and their children, cowboys, scouts and Indians, 

Husbandmen with burdens, and the flocks they drove before them, 

Down this old trail that died here like last year's water in dry and 

dusty ditches. 
To be one raveled fringe of a dream of a city forgotten. 

Others may delve in the past and dusty pages and parchments in the 

Old Palace library. 
To track life down to the death and old trails to extinction. 
Like rivers that sink in the sea and the dead in the midnight. 
I and another I know will follow backward and steadily upward. 
For every trail leads two ways; past the fence posts and ditches. 
Past the arroyos like wounds, and the ledges and bare ribs of earth , 

and animals, 
Past green pinyons like plumes of the great folded wings of the foot 

hills. 
To the tall mountains' gray brows, and the dazzling white veils of the 

snow peaks. 
Up to a past that is older than all earth's dreams and her cities, 

and new as sunrise this morning. 
Up to a sunlight unshadowed by dust; that first trails start for. 

Santa Fe 11 13 18 



70 



THE REV EN ANT 

I sit in the New Museum Patio, 

At a long brown, bare writing table, in Santa Fe. 

And tiie cool gray walls are good to me, and the gray shadows 

Of the vigas round the courtyard shift and lengthen, 

Like the dark green shadows on the green grass plot in the center. 

The round, brown pine tree pillars of the cloister stand up sturdily. 
They have found peace at last in a place of long and ceaseless silences. 
That only the tireless ticking of a typewriter or the foot-fall of a 

careless tourist distracts or distrubs. 
It is a place of peace and cool repose for people worn threadbare by 

the world's vast restlessness 
With its open hatchway to Heaven and the sunlight that smiles on 

them. 

I have sailed on many ships and shall sail again 

On blue days and on still days, with their hidden engines throbbing 
steadily. 

But here in mid land high on the roof of Mountain America, 

Ships and the makers and movers of ships are as far from me and as 
unfit for me 

As they were for the brown Franciscans who planted the brown pine 
tree crosses here three hundred years ago. 

But they planted the masts and yards of ships wherever they set 
them up; 

Brown symbols of a world that sails a sea unfathomed and shoreless; 

A sea of space and of terror and time, death and midnight and mys- 
tery. 

For this world is a world of sailors who stand on earth and water 

ridges. 
And who watch the sky and the winds and the clouds perforce or die 

in the din of machines. 
So much the West has taught me; and yesterday when I took the 

train at Lamy 
For the last time in a year or two, perhaps, I loved this mountain 

land of ours 
More than ever before, it seemed, with its storm that swept down 

on us; 



71 



Drowning tar blue mountain vistas, and the yuccas budded and bloom- 
ing by the fringes of raw, red arroyos; 

And its high clear nearness to the sky and to space that we sail fn 
forever and forever. 

I must go East again to the cities and seaports of all tall mountain 

voyaging. 
Cities that are sirens painted and purblind, and homes of marred 

mothers and masters of men. 
I shall go East to be lost for a time in the dazzle of the arc-lights and 

the coils of tortured subways. 
As a diver toils through a sea wall of surf with strange stars in his 

eyes, and his heart and lungs tense with laboring, 
I shall come out again in a wide world of air in the far-flung furrows 

of high snow-crested ranges. 
There on the sinuous crest of the world, in the sun that is lite to 

all living. 

Here in this hatchway of time with the blue sky brooding white 

clouds above me 
And the green earth growing white hollyhocks that bloom in the 

corners of our courtyard: 
As a sailor sits cross-legged in a calm, dreaming a little as he stitches 

sails for tomorrow's adventuring; 
I set my stitches of ink on white sails of paper tor me or another; 

and I know 
I shall come back again whatever may meet me tomorrow 
To this West that I love best of all in the still, deep, hidden, human 

heart of me. 
For when 1 die the winds of the sky shall bring back here what is 

left of me. 

Santa Fe 7 1 19 



72 



TREASURE SEEKERS 

Near their studio two friends of ours found scattered potsherds. 
They started to look for lost foundations on the loma slope in April 

light. 
We traced the stone oblong of a house that looked at sunrise as we 

looked at it. 
Tomorrow I may go there and dig beside them, near the corner or the 

crossing of two walls. 

We may find treasure of turquoise, or obsidian, spear heads and arrow 

heads. 
Perfect burial bowls, or a bone flute that lay mute five hundred years. 
Yucca fibre wet with sweat, blood or tears that dried to dust. 
We must make haste with our digging, while the dream of it all is 

stuff of spring. 

We who try to paint and write today, may bring to our dead brothers 
Something that is good for their ghosts, though we never find an idol 

at all; 
Never disinter one skeleton; there is treasure on our loma when we 

try for it. 
Stooping in the shadow of lost walls to make a memory, of a house of 

life that stood here four square to sun and storm. 

Santa Fe 4 3 21 



73 



PUPPETS AND PEOPLE 

We had a community theatre here two years ago. 

Something happened, or failed to happen, and it disappeared. 

Now we have a new little Art Theatre, intimately narrowing, 

Fairly efficient — as the French say, the good ever fights with the best. 

Clever comedies cleverly staged are all very well in their way. 
Once every month or two is too long to wait for all we must go without. 
Someday this community thing will come back to stay in our hearts; 

we'll wonder at 
Miracle plays and other plays of many clans in our tribe, and Greek 

and Spanish dances done as San Domingo does. 

V. D. says that nowadays she'd rather see a first magnitude track 
meet. 

Or a big base ball game, breaking hard in the ninth, than most of their 
minor puppet shows. 

V. D. would rather be than act; being what she is, I'm not blaming her. 

There are times when I prefer tennis to oratorios, and hiking to Ber- 
nard Shaw. 

"Acting, like dancing, has its use," says V. D.; "So has war when 

you're keyed up to it. 
There are mobs that we hate — but we want to live in a crowd, now 

and then, going strong; 
Something more modern than Greece and minuets, something as big 

and heart stirring as those mountain tops. 
Tragedy poises there, the high plains sustain then — Whitman's men 

and women, to match all out of doors." 

Santa F6 5 7 21 



74 



PUSSY CATS AND CHERUBIM 

There are certain rooms upstairs in our museum of art that belong 

More to an artist dead and little known than to anyone alive. 

People see the pictures, but sunrise and moonlight see more than 
Beauregard's beauty slowly spelled 

Through the long gallery and the two ante rooms and the corner room 
resplendent 

With its hand carved and color patterned great vigas and pine fur- 
niture, and the tall copper tea urn whose shadow slowly shifts. 

"We ought to use this room more," said Vera Deane, one day when 
we looked in after lunch. 

"In spite of their hand picked lady profiteer patronesses of the sort 
that keeps culture to itself. 

Once in a while Notabilities arrive, linger in the state, meet our Cap- 
ital City. 

A Function is arranged; then they throw open the doors of their toy 
house of littleness to some of us. 

Anyhow they haven't locked them up yet, to keep trippers from Kansas 
and Texas in their places. 

Men are such egotistic brutes with their treasure houses of small art 

strivings 
We small town women have to copy them; you will stage your big 

book tea elsewhere. 
Men and women and artists forever are divided into sharers and 

hoarders. 
It takes both kinds to go on with; the little ones play safe when 

they can. 
It takes a big person to get life across from a studio or a tea urn and 

stay with it. 

Little folks get together in cliques and clubs; they graft on Institu- 
tions men have never yet learned to use. 

You have a community center of a sort, and a Stranger's Club down- 
stairs; be thankful for that. 

Hoarders are better than wasters — sometimes — though they put their 
Impossible Pussy cats 

In our corner Pueblo fire place yonder, and elsewhere; if you get 
what I mean. 

Life wished social andirons on us as well as warmer things; I like the 
dumb ones better; let's go and take a ride." 



75 



Half an hour later, by an adobe on the loma, four brown dolls of the 
dirt 

Stared at us speechless till V. D. startled in them symptoms of cher- 
ubim starting chuckling. 

That night she sighed and told me "They never known how much they 
miss, 

Those club women and culture hoarders, who have one or two, or none 
at all. 

I'd rather share my life with my man and my last horn's brothers and 
sisters' broken playthings. 

Toy houses are for fun, my dear, each empty one like empty eyes 
means tragedy — play Mousorgsky." 

Santa F6 5 6 21 



76 



SUNSET -NEW MEXICO 

On the loma shoulder by the gray adobe. 

Two horses stand by a well head high on the sky line. 

The first snow lingers still in a lonely hollow. 

Like a handkerchief dropped by a dancer as she hurries. 

Scraps of it hide in the creases and cracks of the foot hills. 

They are crumpled heaps of clothes that slid past the knees of the 

mountains 
A hundred thousand thousand years ago, when they began 
To make them ready for music whiter than moonlight at midnight. 

Twilight is their tire woman, eternally patient. 

The shadows are her dusky slaves that slip on tiptoe 

Into hidden closets behind the clouds' low curtains, 

Into distant corners of far gardens in high ranges' treasure cities. 

Bringing the elements of bueaty out of dimness for her high and 

nightly ritual. 
The sunset flames and glows and tremoles, 
Like an island of opals disintegrating and flooding 
Blue lakes with scarlet flakes, and bare gray beaches with reaches 

of mirrored amber. 
And the sky changes as a woman's gray eyes brighten in a round and 

silver banded mirror. 
When her face is flushing softly in the light of her own loveliness. 

Heaven has lit her footlights, 

And lifted up her great drop curtain ever so little. 

And here on the edge of her radiance. 

Where the dancers' feet begin to beat ever so little to new pulses 

stirring them. 
The trailing borders of their robes appear; 
Ultramarine and crimson, pale green, pearl gray and lilac; 
Purple deeper than twilight's own deep hem as she lets fall, 
AH the flowers that flame and dicker on far mesas for the mazes of 

her dance. 
All the fruits of all the plantations of earth are glowing together there; 
Airy orbs and ardent apples for dream orchards and vineyards, and 

red and blue berries bright with dew. 
And they tread them under their feet in the harvest vat of the dusk, 

and slowly distil 
The cool, dark wine of the night that she lifts to the lips of her 

dancers. 



77 



Twilight swings strings of jewels that lall and flash before their wait- 
ing feet; 
Rubies, beryls, spinels; topaz, jaspar and turquoise; 
Sapphires, pearls, opals, emeralds; sardonyx and amethyst; 
And dull gray agates at last, like pebbles for the feet of the dancers. 

But the feet of the dancers cannot feel either pebbles or apples. 
Their feet are of air. their bodies are air, their breasts are air, and 

their lips that whisper it. 
Their faces are phantoms of light and beauty beyond all beauty men 

image or mirror. 
Dreams of the Lord of all Light who made His mountains old women 

who wait for His singers and dancers; 
With their heads in the night where the stars are coronets and tall 

tiaras and high halos. 
Rounding their brows and their throats like falling notes of the song 

all space is ringing with at sunset 
ATiere high on the loma's shoulder beside their horses by the well 

head, 
A woman and a girl are standing; looking and longing, and listening. 

Santa Fe 10 31 18 



78 



HIGH SCHOOL TENNIS COURT 

A girl with a racket sweeping high, smashing to the back line — 

An arc like a crescent moon inverted — Diana — Valkyrie, 

Swinging speed and stark will to the mark wth the weight of a 

war hammar — 
Etched against a skyline of glowing snow peaks and sunset light. 

Day grows grayer as she drives duller balls to dimmer corners. 
There is a Woman of the Worlds somewhere who serves spinning 

planets and plunging meteors so; 
Shifting speed and matter through surer meshes that move tomorrow. 
To make the mothers of a nation of men fit to fight forever failing 

light. 

Santa Fe 5 8 21 



79 



ENVOY 

I have come back again to this mountain land I always love, 

After many journey ings, farther east and west. 

I have seen two oceans, and tall cities I am tiring of. 

And the ranges .'^pell long purpose through blue beauty's dome of rest. 

The ranges of lost wonderlands men loved and longed for yesterday. 
Where their ghosts go slowly through the dust of dim and distant 

trails; 
And the little winds of morning rise, and dead hearts stir and start 

away. 
And the singing skyline changes till the twilight dulls rnd fails. 

Here is freedom from perdition, in the jangled wills of driven men. 
And sick souls of wasted women, in her high, clear amber light; 
And a timeless gray tradition that old bells twice blessed intone again. 
When the twilight like God's kiss comes down to wish this world 
good night. 

Here is solace in stmrises, when her eastern stubborn wall of stone 
Seems to lift to airy altar lights; past timber line and snow 
The shadows some caressing earth; and here a man may lie alone 
With the eye of heaven that warms today, and what the wind may 
know. 

There is sound of running water where her hidden rivers glide. 
There are pine trees talking to red rocks, and to any human ear 
That can spell one least still letter of truth her trembling aspens hide. 
And forget those fevered cities while her secrets whisper here. 

Santa Fe 5 5 4 



